


Blazing Sun

by esama



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Explicit Language, Friendship, Gen, Other, Out of Character, Solarpunk, Trope Subversion/Inversion, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-23
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-02-22 08:40:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 16
Words: 30,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2501546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/esama/pseuds/esama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Meeting your soulmate would be, without any pain of doubt, the best thing to ever happen to you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Check end notes for spoilery warnings.

The whole thing was made so much worse by the fact that everyone – his mother included – had spent what then had felt like his whole life assuring him that it would be the _best thing ever to happen to him_. It was in the bedtime stories, in the gossip, it was in the whispered ghost tales shared by the children, it was in the random chitchat between teens. It was _everywhere_ , spoken by everyone.

Meeting your soulmate would be, without any pain of doubt, the best thing to ever happen to you. So they said. Your life would become better in a heartbeat. The world would be brighter, more beautiful. Things would start making sense. Past hurts would be healed, bitterness would fade, all the evils and wrongs you'd endured would stop mattering. The future would suddenly stand before you and it would be _beautiful_ and _perfect_ and you'd be a new, better person from then on. Your old life would end and a new, better one would begin.

And Cloud had believed that too – the same as everyone. He'd felt breathless and giddy and hopeful when he'd heard the stories. When his mother had spoken of her first meeting with his father, he'd listened silently and almost reverently to how she'd described the feeling. Like the world had come to a standstill and suddenly there were _colours_ she'd never noticed before, and how everything had felt warm, smelled sweet, how she'd suddenly felt lighter, happier, fuller. There's nothing quite like it, Cloudy, it was like becoming _whole_ after a lifetime of being _broken_.

He'd looked forward to it. Same as every kid, he'd imagined it a thousand times, what it would be like – what his soulmate would be like. Some said that a soulmate was your perfect opposite, so for a while he'd imagined them like that. They'd be strong and brilliant and beautiful, everything Cloud wasn't. They'd be that sort of impeccable, casual perfection he was so jealous of in the likes of Tifa – but they would never dismiss him like she did, no. They'd like him, love him, and never call him bad names, even if they were so much better than he was, they'd think _he_ was just as good as they were.

Sometimes he imagined his soulmate to be like him – because that sometimes happened, sometimes soulmates were so close to each other that they could pass for siblings. So he imagined them, blond and blue eyed and slight, small. Like him they weren't too impressive to look at, or intimidating. Together, they'd be two of a kind and neither would ever again feel like they were somehow lacking, whenever they looked at other people, taller and stronger than them. Together, they'd feel perfect and nothing else mattered.

Cloud imagined what his soulmate might be like so many times that the mental images blurred together. Tall, strong, thin, small, thick, it didn't matter – he was sure whatever his soulmate would be like, they'd be perfect for him. Like everyone's soulmate was perfect for them. That was just how it happened – sometimes you didn't even know what you _needed_ until it was there, in your soulmate, and then… then it would be okay.

He couldn't wait for it to happen to _him_ and the day when his string materialised on his little finger, a little shining thread of almost tangible _potential,_ was the best of his short life. Cloud was eight, then – a little young for the string, which usually appeared when a person was about ten, eleven. But that was okay, that was _brilliant_ , it would just mean that it would happen so much faster for him!

The string was about ten centimetres long, trailing into nothingness just a little past his fingertip when he pointed it out – but that didn't matter. At the end of his string there was his soulmate, with a matching string pointing to his direction – probably looking straight at the direction where he was looking back.

"Well, then. Let's go out and see!" his mother said at the sight of the string, and together they'd hurriedly pulled their coats on and headed out, following the direction Cloud's string was trailing in. It led them through the town and to the outskirts where it remained pointing eastward, ignoring each and every person in Nibelheim.

"Oh. Well," his mother said, crouching down beside him. "That just means they live in some other town."

Cloud said nothing. He knew what it meant when a string led to out of town. It meant that instead of meeting his soulmate _that very day_ like he wanted to, it might take years. No one – except maybe Mayor Lockhart and his family – had the money to travel. Some people in Nibelheim had the same thing happen to them, and then they'd had to save money for _years_ to be able to go and find their perfect partner.

And the Strife family certainly didn't have the sort of money needed.

"Don't worry, sweet heart," his mother said. "You'll meet them eventually. It'll just… take a little longer. And who knows – maybe the person will travel to you, like your father came for me!"

"Or maybe they can't, like I can't," Cloud said, sullen, and poked at his string with one finger tip. Maybe his soulmate would feel it and know that he couldn't come, that he was sorry, that maybe… but no, of course his finger just went through the string, and it didn't as much as stutter.

At least the string was still bright, vivid red. That meant his soulmate was still alive, and probably looking for him. If it went grey, like his mother's, then…

"One day, you'll meet them," his mother said, holding her hand with its grey, limp string over his. "One day."

That became the new, somewhat bittersweet nexus of Cloud's life. One day, he thought, while he became one of those poor people in Nibelheim who every day ventured to the town's edge, to desolately stare at the distance. One day he'd cross over the distance, he thought. So as long as his string remained bright red, there was hope. One day.

One day.

He started planning for that one day. He'd get a job as quick as he could – delivering newspapers probably, which was usually the first job a boy could get in Nibelheim. But he'd take others too, as quick as he could. Running errands, mowing lawns, cleaning gutters, whatever, he'd take any job he could get, and he'd save money until he could get out of Nibelheim. He'd head east, he'd follow the string.

And if his soulmate wasn't on the Western Continent at all, then he'd head over the sea and to the East Continent. And when he'd find his soulmate, he'd… stay in the east. He'd join ShinRa, probably, because ShinRa was everywhere and everyone said the pay was good. At first he imagined himself in the Army – which according to the old folk took everyone who was stupid enough to join, but eventually his plans shifted into the realm of day dreams.

He would meet his soulmate and it would be _perfect_. Then he'd go to Midgar – with his soulmate of course – and he'd join SOLDIER and become a hero. Just the sort of person his soulmate would deserve. Maybe his soulmate would come too, if they were a guy – and if not, then his soulmate would get her dream job, whatever it would be. And if that didn't work out for her, then Cloud would support her by being the best SOLDIER around. And it would be, of course, perfect.

 


	2. Chapter 2

Cloud was just coming back from his fourth day at his very first job – delivering newspapers – when it happened. Or, more specifically, that was when he noticed it.

His red string was no longer pointing east.

It had moved ever so slightly southward. It was almost unnoticeable, that was how slight the shift was – but like everyone who hadn't yet met their soulmate, Cloud had been staring at his string long enough to have memorised the exact angle the string had. To him the infinitesimal shift was as good as earthquake.

He ran all the way home and crashed into the house, breathless with excitement and giddiness. While his mother, just awoken and blinking blearily, looked on with confusion, he rushed to get a map and a compass, both of which he set down before slapping his hand down and mapping the shift in the string's direction. It _had_ moved – about a degree's worth south.

"They're moving. My soulmate is moving!" Cloud said, looking up to his mother. "Do you think -?"

"Might be that they're just travelling to another town," his mother cautioned him, yawning as she leaned in to look. "But let's keep an eye on it, just in case."

As the day progressed, the string shifted more and more – just by fractions of a degree, but any movement was _major_ when it came to a soul string. Cloud was utterly unable to do anything the entire day, except stare at the string and the map, marking every shift on the map with a red pen, trying to figure out where his soulmate was and where they were going. Wondering wildly if his soulmate was doing the exact same thing as he was on a similar map.

When evening came, the string stopped moving and Cloud was convinced he knew what had happened. Because of course, he had an old line on the map, marking where his soul string had originally been pointing – from Nibelheim _straight_ to Midgar. It didn't point quite there anymore, no.

His soulmate had travelled from Midgar to Junon.

Before this he hadn't been sure if his soulmate was really in Midgar, or somewhere along the way – or, who knew, somewhere far past Midgar. Now he was sure, unshakably sure.

"So they're on the east continent after all," his mother said thoughtfully, worriedly. It was a long way, after all. She sighed and then patted his shoulder. "Well, at least now we know."

Except the next day, when Cloud woke up before the sun to the sound of his alarm clock ringing, the string had shifted again. He managed only by sheer _forcing_ to get himself to leave the map and head out to the office to get his quota of the morning's papers to deliver – and the entire day he kept watching the string, trying to see if it moved.

It did, swinging back northward – and for a while he was afraid his soulmate had just headed back to Midgar. But no, that wasn't where the string stopped later that evening.

"Do you think they're coming for me?" Cloud asked giddily, when he marked the progress the string had made on the map – now it pointed towards Costa Del Sol.

"I… I don't know, sweetheart. It might be," his mother said, sounding somewhat apprehensive as she too stared at the map.

When the string swung more, and began making rapid pace northward, Cloud started being a bit apprehensive too. His soulmate was travelling a lot. Travelling took a lot of money. What if his soulmate was like the Lockharts? What if they were _wealthy_? Cloud's little family of two wasn't wealthy – they were barely more than dirt poor, really. In all of his imaginings and day dreams he'd never even considered the idea that his soulmate might have _money_ , like, a lot of money.

The string moved and moved, and stopped pointing at Rocket Town. While Cloud frowned at his string in disappointment – he'd really been thinking, even expecting, that his soulmate would be coming straight for him. Why had they gone to Rocket Town? He wasn't in Rocket Town, and his string couldn't have been pointing anywhere near that direction. Had his soul mate made a mistake or something? Maybe they had a bad sense of direction – or a bad map.

His mother stared at the string too, looking uneasy and troubled. "Might be a child of an engineer," she murmured. "Yes, of course. That must be it."

The string didn't move for a couple of days after that, pointing steadily towards Rocket Town. Cloud checked it all the time, every minute it felt like, for any sort of progress, but it didn't budge. Whatever his soulmate was doing, they didn't seem to be in any hurry to come to him. Hadn't they noticed that the string moved as they did? They must've noticed. What was there in Rocket Town anyway, except boring old factories and laboratories? Who cared about those?

Didn't his soulmate want to meet him? Didn't they care? Or couldn't they come? Was it like his mother thought – his soulmate was the child of some ShinRa worker, just moved to Rocket Town because their parents got a new job in some of the impressive projects going on in the town. Close, but still too far – other side of a whole mountain range.

Cloud was half willing to try and brace the whole of the Nibel mountain range to get to them, money and dangers be damned – when the string swung sharply to thewest and then stayed steady, pointing at Wutai.

"They didn't go to Wutai, right?" Cloud asked desperately. Wutai was a warzone, even he knew that – if his soulmate went there then they'd be in _danger_ and might get _killed_ before he even met them! Besides, why would a kid go to Wutai anyway? What sort of parents would take a _kid_ to Wutai.

"Oh no," was all his mother said, looking at his string and then covering her face with her hands.

She thought – not without reason – that his soulmate might be a whole lot older than Cloud. His string had come in early, after all – that usually meant that the soulmate was older, past the time when _their_ string should've manifested. It happened all the time – it had happened to her too, her string had appeared when she'd been nine, and Cloud's father had been a good six years older than her. She'd feared that, judging by the path Cloud's soulmate had taken, they might be a ShinRa employee.

Now she feared they might be part of the ShinRa military – or _worse_.

Cloud refused to believe it – neither that his soulmate might be whole lot older, nor that they might be in Wutai and about to take part in the war. His soulmate would not just die before he got to meet them. They weren't. They _weren't_. Sure it happened sometimes, like it had happened with one of the older kids in the school, whose string had appeared, persisted for a couple of months and then suddenly turned grey without any warning. But that was stuff that happened to _other people_. It wasn't going to happen to him. No way.

No, his soulmate was just heading somewhere else and had taken a pit stop. They were maybe heading to Cosmo Canyon. Sure, it had nothing to do with ShinRa but maybe… who knows, maybe they were going to head to Gongaga or something. There was a reactor in Gongaga, right?

He was so busy trying to figure out what sort of route his soulmate might be taking in order to justify his belief that they were still in Western Continent, still safe – that he never noticed the string move again, faster than it ever had before, going a full three hundred and sixty degree circle around his little finger.

Not before there was a knock on the door.


	3. Chapter 3

It took less than five minutes for everything to change.

There was a man outside the door – two of them, actually, one slightly behind the other. They both wore fancy clothing, black jackets and black slacks and ties, and they had Cloud's mother instantly flustered by their presence alone. And beside them – between them – they had a boy, a few years older and several centimetres taller than Cloud, dressed as fancily as the two men.

And on the boy's finger there was a red string, leading across the scant meters to Cloud's finger.

"Oh dear," Cloud's mother murmured while Cloud stared at his and the boy's hands with astonishment. His mother did the same, her eyes wide. "Oh _dear_. Right. Do – do come in."

"Ma'am," the first of the men said and stepped in, one hand on the boy's shoulder. The other man glanced behind them and then closed the door – staying outside. "Sorry to barge in on you like this," the man said, giving Cloud's mom a brief smile. "But as you can see, we obviously have a –"

"Is this it?" the boy asked, staring at Cloud. "A _boy_?"

"Um," Cloud answered, a little too shocked by the whole thing. For all that he had been hoping and dreaming and imagining, he hadn't expected… well he hadn't actually expected to meet his soulmate this soon or this easily. He'd thought that ultimately he would have to go to them, even after the string had shown him that his soulmate was on the Western Continent. He had thought he would have to put effort into it. To have his soulmate suddenly standing in front of him, just like that…

Cloud swallowed, not sure what to do. Hold out his hand maybe? Or hug the other boy? The boy didn't look like he would like to be hugged. He was frowning at Cloud, he looked… unhappy, actually. He was blond and stood really straight and his eyes were blue – and Cloud thought, somewhat hazily, that they were _that_ sort of soulmate pair, who would always be confused as siblings, huh? But that didn't matter as much as the look the boy was giving Cloud. He looked _disappointed_. And he had the sort of face – all sharp and clean and polished, the sort of face girls really liked – that made disappointed look very mean.

"I wanted it to be a girl," the boy said, looking Cloud up and down. "You're not even an impressive looking boy."

"Young master," the man said, almost but not quite admonishing.

"Well, he isn't! Look at him; he looks like… like… a _commoner_!"

Something twisted inside Cloud's belly and he opened his mouth, to defend himself or argue or something, but nothing came out. _Commoner_? Tifa had used that word once – as a joke with her friends, when they were playing, and it had been cutting then. Now, it was even more so – because the boy said it like he actually _thought_ so.

"Veld? Is he stupid too?" the boy asked, turning to the man.

"Young master, please –" the man said, sounding almost pained.

"He looks stupid," the boy said and stepped forward. "Come on, _say something_. There's no way _my_ soulmate would be a dullard."

"I'm _not_ a dullard!" Cloud answered, outraged.

"Well at least you can speak," the boy said, sniffing at him. "What's your name?"

Something about the way he asked it made it sound very unpleasant – not like he was actually curious or anything, but that he just simply expected his question to be answered because he deigned to ask it. "What's yours?" Cloud asked just as unpleasantly, folding his arms and leaning back.

" _I_ am Rufus Shinra," the boy said, with another sniff.

"O-oh," Cloud's mother said, her hand coming to her chest, her face going pale. She looked up to the man. "I-is he? Oh… _fuck_."

"Mom!" Cloud gasped with shock, glancing up at her.

"Yes, well," the man, Veld, coughed and then forced a smile. "How about we sit down and talk a bit? This being something of a… special situation."

Rufus looked up at that. "But he hasn't even told me his name yet!" he said, pointing at Cloud.

"Young master, please," Veld said exasperatedly, following Cloud's increasingly pale mother away from the front door and deeper into the house.

"Hmph," Rufus answered, glancing after the adults and then turning to Cloud, seeing as they seemed not to be expecting them to follow. He folded his arms. "You're being very rude, you know."

" _I'm_ being rude?" Cloud asked, disbelieving.

"You _are_ , not telling me your name even though I told you mine. Very impolite," the other boy said. "How old are you even? Six?"

"I'm _eight_ and my name is Cloud. Cloud Strife."

"You're kidding me, right?" Rufus asked. "Cloud? What kind of name is _Cloud_?"

Cloud let out a choked, outraged noise at the tone of voice Rufus used to say his name – like it was something dirty to be wiped off the bottom of his shoe. It was going all sorts of _wrong._ Rufus was supposed to be perfect and nice and kind, not… an _asshole_. He was like all of the worse kids in Cloud's school put together – with Major Lockhart's arrogance and Mrs. Lockhart's haughty sniffing on top of it all.

"Wait," Cloud said. "Shinra. Like… _ShinRa_ , Shinra?"

"Obviously," Rufus said, looking him up and down. "And you're a _nobody_."

Cloud stared at him with disbelief. _ShinRa_ 's Shinra. As in, the family that controlled ShinRa Electric Power Company – the one they had just recently talked about in history class. And… weren't there only three of them? President Shinra, his wife and… their son.

"No way," Cloud said, dumbstruck. His soulmate was the son of President Shinra? " _No way_."

"Hmph!" Rufus answered, walking past him and after the adults. Cloud stared after him for a moment and then hurried after him.

Veld and his mother were sitting down by the kitchen table, and Veld – who Cloud only now noticed had a briefcase with him – was spreading some papers in front of his mother. "Mr. Shinra, being a very busy individual, could not come here personally, obviously, so we will have to sort out the details without him. I have all the necessary paperwork here, of course, and it is all perfectly official."

"Paperwork?" Cloud asked, confused, and Rufus snorted at him again. "What?"

"What do you mean _what_? What do you think we came here for?" Rufus asked and sat down beside Veld.

"It isn't…" Cloud's mother stared and then frowned as she took the topmost paper and looked at it more closely. "Oh. Right."

"It is all very routine, you'll find," Veld assured her. "It is done quite often in Midgar."

"Midgar is Midgar," she answered feebly and looked up. "Is this… really necessary?"

"Mr. and Mrs. Shinra find it to be _extremely_ necessary," Veld said stiffly.

"What is it, though?" Cloud asked, hopping to sit beside his mother and leaning in to look, half afraid it would be something like an engagement or betrothal form or something – even though he wasn't even sure if those things were even a _thing_. But no, it wasn't anything like that.

"Confidentiality agreement?" Cloud read, confused.

"Naturally," Rufus said, examining his fingernails. "Did you really think we were going to let some scrub and his no name-family from a little backwater hole like _Nibelheim_ go around telling that he was _my_ soulmate? Hah! You'll find a restraining order there too."

Cloud opened his mouth and then closed it, turning to his mother, who was reading the contract with a faintly pained look on her face.

Veld gave them what might've passed for a sympathetic look. "Under the terms of the contract, you would agree to not in any shape or form inform or let anyone know of your connection to the Shinra family," he said. "Neither individuals or institutions of any sort. And young master is quite right – there is indeed a restraining order included, which would remain in effect until young master would be twenty one years of age – or until the Shinra family repealed the restraining order themselves."

"Might as well keep it standing forever," Rufus said, folding his arms and giving Cloud an unpleasant look. "I don't want anyone knowing I have a _commoner_ for a soulmate."

"Are you kidding me?" Cloud asked. "We just _met_ and you want me to… to never talk about you, or see you again? Why not?"

"Why _would_ I?" Rufus asked. "Look at you! You're… tiny, and dirty, and you kind of smell weird. Why would I, or anyone, want a soulmate like you? Besides, I'm Rufus Shinra," he added. "Do you think that I would like to have a pathetic dweep like you around me?"

"Young master," Veld said sharply through gritted teeth. "Please hold your tongue before you say something you might regret later."

"Hmph. I won't regret it," Rufus muttered. "I wanted my soulmate to be a pretty _girl_. It would've been okay even if she was a commoner if she was just pretty. But a boy? What use is a _boy_ to me? And such a wimpy, stupid looking boy at that."

"Hey!" Cloud said, frowning. "You're not exactly impressive either!"

Except he kind of was, in a cold, off-putting sort of way.

Rufus gave him a look and snorted. "You're not even smart," he said. "I don't get why someone like you would be my soulmate but whatever. It's not like I have to ever see you again."

"Well… good. It's not like I'd ever want to see you either!" Cloud snapped and glanced at his mother. "Let's sign it. Let's sign _all of it_ ," he said sullenly. "The quicker they leave, the better."

"Now, Cloud, let's not be hasty," she said uneasily. "It's a really serious thing."

"Yeah, a seriously _annoying_ thing!" Cloud said, reaching for the papers. "Where do I sign this thing?"

They said that when you met your soulmate for the first time, it was like everything was suddenly new. All the things in the past faded away and became inconsequential – and it was like your old life had ended and a whole new one began. There was the life when you were alone, and a life with your soulmate, as different from each other as day and night.

They said that when you met your soulmate for the first time, you became a new person. A stronger person, no longer broken and fractured but _whole_ and complete.

"You know," Rufus said as his parting words. "Maybe I'll consider seeing you again if you, I don't know… do something remarkable or something. If you become someone _important_ then maybe."

"Yeah, and maybe one day you'll shit gold bricks too," Cloud answered.

They said many things that, turned out, were complete bullshit.


	4. Chapter 4

For a couple of months after meeting and parting with Rufus for the first time, Cloud was a mess of anger, bitterness and pretty much every emotion in between and around. And he wished, he really desperately wished, that sadness wasn't somewhere in there, but it was. How could it not be, when for all of his short life he'd been prepared for his soulmate to be perfect for him and then… then…

It took a while for him to think straight again and after that, it became obvious that meeting with Rufus had really changed him – and probably not for the best. It was in the faces of his classmates who now carefully went around him, and in the sad hollow look his mother gave him – in the suspicious stares of the townspeople. What had been just another happy cheerful child had been turned into a bitter ball of anger over night, and no one liked the change – Cloud least of all.

And he _couldn't_ change back. Try as he might, he couldn't find things to laugh about the same way he used to – and every time he tried a smile, it came out small, forced, stiff and incredibly unpleasant.

The thing – possibly the _worst_ thing – about meeting your soulmate for the first time was that it was so darn memorable. Everything from the room temperature and the smell of wood smoke coming from the fireplace, the chiming of the grandfather clock and the feeling of the recent scrape on Cloud's knee, he could remember all of it with _perfect crystal clarity_. And of course, he could recall each and every word Rufus had spoken, as if he'd just said them minutes ago, instead of days, weeks, months.

_Why would I, or anyone, want a soulmate like you? Why would I, or anyone, want a soulmate like you? Why would I…_

The bitterness was a constant backbeat to everything afterwards and, try as he might, Cloud couldn't stop himself from being angry all the time. He banged doors and kicked his trashcan until it was dented and he broke pretty much everything breakable in his room inside a month. He got three reprimands at school for fighting and eventually was threatened with expulsion if he didn't straighten up.

"Cloud, please," his mother would say, over and over, with soulful eyes and a sad grimace. "Can't you just… concentrate on something else? Please…"

"Like what?!" Cloud roared back. "Please tell me, I'm really curious to know! What else is there to concentrate on?!"

The constant anger didn't make him feel any less shitty about it when he made her cry.

He did try. For a while he tried to _take it out_ like the school counsellor said. He picked up a stick and beat up a tree trunk with it until his arms shook and his lungs were aching. It helped some, but not much. Fighting other kids helped the most – but he couldn't do that without making the parents and teachers mad at him, and despite everything, he didn't want to be expelled from school. And he tried really, really hard to just concentrate on other things. His life wasn't over, after all, he could still do things and damn Rufus too.

Except then the words, _maybe I'll consider seeing you again if you, I don't know… do something remarkable or something,_ sounded in the back of his head and then he was furious again.

It would've been so much better if he had never met Rufus. Or if he was one of those people whose string went grey before they met theirs. That hollow sadness would've been so much preferable to this… red hot _betrayal_ he constantly felt.

"If you can't move past the anger," the school counsellor said – who by roundabout asking had figured out that Cloud had met his soulmate, though she didn't know who, and that the soulmate had outright rejected Cloud. "Then try and direct it somewhere."

"Where?" Cloud asked through gritted teeth.

"Whatever works," the counsellor said, eying him and leaning forward. "Whatever satisfies the burn. There must be something your soulmate said, something that makes you extra mad."

Cloud snorted at that. There were a lot of things Rufus had said that made him mad – actually, Rufus hadn't really said anything that _hadn't_. The self-important tone of voice, the way he spoke, all haughty, the goddamned imperious sniffing. Just thinking about it made Cloud want to punch things.

"Take that," the counsellor said. "And turn it around."

Turn it around. That, Cloud thought, sounded rather like _stop taking it and start dishing it out_. Or, in simpler terms, revenge.

But how could he get revenge on someone who was half a world away, protected by a confidentiality agreement and restraining order? Cloud couldn't speak of Rufus or get within a hundred kilometres of him under pain of imprisonment and worse! And on top of that, Rufus was from the head family of _ShinRa_. He had all the power in the world at his disposal. What was Cloud?

 _A nobody_.

The more he thought about it, the worse it came. All he really accomplished was just spreading out the hate he felt, from Rufus to his entire family and then onto the whole of ShinRa Electric Power Company. Not that there was a person in Nibelheim who didn't on some level loathe ShinRa, but Cloud took it to new, powerful heights.

At the worst point of his anger, he seriously pondered how to make a bomb to destroy the reactor on top of Mt.Nibel. Nothing less than such wholesale destruction would satisfy the burn, he thought. Things needed to shatter before he'd be fine again. Lots of very important, very powerful things needed to _break_.

Eventually it concentrated onto one clear point of thought.

Destroy ShinRa.

It was a stupid thought, a stupid, childish, overly ambitious thought – but in it he found something like a centre. It got easier to not shout at people, or pick fights, or break things, to concentrate onto that single thought. It wasn't the trashcan's fault, or his mother's, or his class mates'. It was ShinRa's fault. Rufus was an arrogant imperious asshole because ShinRa gave him the power to be that way – because being part of ShinRa had raised him that way.

Destroy ShinRa, and it would be… better.

Destroy ShinRa and Rufus would be hurt too.

Cloud wasn't stupid – he knew it couldn't be done just like that, not without anything less than a whole nation and whole lot of money. Cloud knew he would never be able to do it. But imagining it and eventually working towards it gave him something to expel the furious energy on. Especially considering that even _thinking_ about it was pretty exhausting.

Because ShinRa was enormous. It was stretched across continents, it had built fleets of ships both in water and in air, it had erected cities and it had conquered most of the known world – and now was waging war in Wutai to conquer it too. Just trying to wrap his mind around that took effort. ShinRa had its own armies; it employed hundreds of thousands of people – and pretty much everyone on three continents and numerous islands, paid their bills to ShinRa. ShinRa had monsters and machines and super SOLDIERs. ShinRa had pretty much every advantage under the sun – they had even made magic into a mass production.

It was a big thought for a kid of his age, and it took a lot of reading on ShinRa's history and scanning the news to get even that far. He made notes on all the important points, he tried to calculate the approximate number of employees and the size of ShinRa's army – he tried to figure out just how much money ShinRa made in a year, in a month, a week, a day. He tried to figure out just how much power would Rufus command, if he ever became the President of ShinRa.

It took him so long and so much concentration, that his mother started to think that maybe he was getting better. The outbursts quieted down and he didn't hit people the entirety of the time, he didn't even shout. "There, see?" she said. "It'll be alright. Just give it time."

"Time. Sure," Cloud agreed, busy trying to figure out where most of ShinRa's power came from and how to, ultimately, undermine it.

How to destroy ShinRa before Rufus ever even got the chance to rule it.


	5. Chapter 5

Cloud was up to his eyeballs in Mako Theory when Tifa approached him cautiously in the Nibelheim Public Library – which was pretty much just another wing of the Nibelheim GeneralSchool. "Hey, um, Cloud? Can I talk with you for a bit?" she asked, rocking on the balls of her feet with both hands behind her back. "Or are you busy?"

Cloud looked up, dropping the pen he'd been chewing. "What?" he asked and frowned at her. No one talked to him much anymore, never mind someone popular like Tifa – who'd _never_ talked with him before. "What do you want?"

"Just to talk a bit," she said, glancing around. "If that's okay with you?"

For a moment he was tempted to tell her to piss off and go bother someone else – but you just didn't say stuff like that to Tifa Lockhart, not in Nibelheim. "Fine, whatever," he said, marked where he'd stopped in the book with the half chewed pen, and turned to her. "So, what?"

She rocked back and forth and then sat down quickly. "You've met your soulmate, right? Like a year or so back?"

Of all the things she could start with, that wasn't one Cloud had expected. Sure, pretty much everyone knew or could guess he had – you didn't go through a change like he had without something major happening to you, after all. No one knew when or how or who it was, just that it had happened, and that he'd been rejected. It had been a rough wakeup call for a lot of kids of his age who'd been dreaming of their perfect first meeting with their perfect soulmate though – kind of like finding out that no, magic wasn't real _magic_ and no, ShinRa wasn't the benevolent overseer people pretended it was.

All the more reason for kids not to like him – he was like that older kid in the upper class now, the one with the grey string. That uncomfortable, unpleasant reminder that sometimes, some things weren't as perfect as adults made them out to be. And who knows, if it happened to him, maybe it would happen to other people.

"If that's what you want to talk about, you can shove it and go away," Cloud said. "I'm not talking about it."

"Well, um. Yeah, no, I didn't mean to –" Tifa hesitated and then quickly laid her hand out. "Look, see?" she said, nodding down. "It came on yesterday."

There was a string curling around her left pinky. It wasn't vivid red like it was supposed to be – it wasn't any sort of red, actually. It was grey, like Cloud's mother's string was. Which usually meant that the soulmate at the other end was missing – aka, dead. Except…

Tifa poked at the string uneasily. It was as taunt as a piano wire, pointing northward with the slightest tilt to the north-west. "What do you think it means?" she asked worriedly.

"The hell am I supposed to know?" Cloud asked incredulously.

"Well, yours is…" she winced a bit and Cloud smothered the urge to glance at his own hand. "Well," she said. "Aside from Nida, you're the only kid in school with _any_ sort of experience. I haven't showed it to my mom or dad yet, because, well. I kinda want to figure it out on my own. So, um…"

Cloud leaned back, eying her hand. Grey usually meant that the other soulmate was dead – but then, when your soulmate was dead, your string went lax and just sort of hung there, and hers was definitely leading somewhere. Which probably meant there was someone on the other end, somehow. "Your soulmate is obviously an undead," he said.

"Shut up! This is serious," Tifa said, shoving at his shoulder. "And I'm seriously freaking out here! I've never heard of a grey string that isn't just hanging."

"Well, neither have I," Cloud shrugged. "I've got no idea what it means. Maybe the person died on an operating table and was resuscitated or something. It happens." Though granted, he'd never heard of something like that affecting a string's colour. But on other hand, he'd never heard of anything but _death_ affecting a string's colour, and his string was changing colour even though Rufus was probably still alive.

"It's still leading somewhere," Cloud pointed out. "Do you know if it's near or far?"

"Um," Tifa said, looking down. "I'm not sure – I kinda… I didn't stop to look?"

Cloud rolled his eyes. "Well, does it point elsewhere here than it did at your house? If the other person is in Nibelheim, it would be pretty obvious. But if it didn't move then they're probably not here. Has it moved?"

"I'm… not sure?" Tifa answered, holding out her hand.

Cloud sighed and stood up, gathering his notebooks and shoving them in his backpack. "Come on," he said, hoisting the thing on his back. "Let's get this over with."

While a partially hesitant and partially excited Tifa followed, Cloud snatched a map from a rack near the counter. Once they were outside – and out of peoples' field of view – he had her lay her hand on the map and then drew a line on it according to the direction her odd grey string was leading. Then he led her to the farthest edge of the town and they repeated the process.

"So… what does that mean?" she asked, looking at the intersecting lines.

"Means you need a tighter map," Cloud said, shrugging his shoulders. "A town map. Or just wait until the other person notices their string and comes to find you."

"You mean they're in town?!" Tifa asked sounding like she was somewhere between excited and horrified.

"Well, yeah, they've got to be close for the string to move at all," Cloud shrugged and held the map out to her. "Do the map thing again with a town map if you're curious. I don't care."

He really didn't want to see the happy first meeting between soulmates, so with that said he turned on his heels and headed back towards the school and the library, intending to get some more research done before school would start.

Of course Tifa couldn't leave him alone and hunted him down – again in the library – during lunch break. "I got it!" she said, sitting down beside him and slapping a map of Nibelheim in front of him. "It's not anyone in town – it's just a little bit outside the town!"

"Whoop-de-fucking-doo," Cloud answered. "Guess how much I care."

"You totally care," she answered and pointed at the map. It was almost covered with lines, all of them pointing at a single point. "See, I mapped it out – I went to a bunch of places in town before class and it always leads that way and it never budged. You know what that is?"

Cloud looked down – and yes, suddenly he did care. "That's the Shinra Mansion," he said and leaned in to look closely. Tifa had drawn about fourteen lines on the map, and they all intersected at Shinra Mansion. "You sure about this?"

"Dead sure," she nodded and then squirmed a bit. "I kinda wanna go there but, you know…" she shrugged uneasily and looked down. "It's Shinra Mansion."

"Yeah," Cloud agreed. Aside from the fact that it was the _Shinra_ _Mansion_ , it was also pretty much abandoned. No one was supposed to be there – no one had been there for years, not since ShinRa had moved its operations to the Eastern Continent a few years before they had even been born.

"Would you come with me?" Tifa asked hopefully. "To see, after school?"

Cloud didn't really even need to think about that. "Do we have to wait until after school?" he asked.

"You want to _skip school_?"

"Wouldn't be the first time," Cloud shrugged. And it wasn't. He skipped half of his classes to go to the library instead and even in the classes he did attend, he mostly read books about energy systems and Mako and ShinRa.

Tifa bit her lip. "Let's wait until after class – otherwise my parents might wonder about it and try and find me," she said. "Um. Meet you here after last class?"

"Fine, whatever," Cloud shrugged. It seemed like a waste to him, but it was her string. As it was, though, he'd been thinking of breaking into the Shinra Mansion before – and hadn't dared to because it was rumoured to be full of monsters ShinRa's scientists had left behind. He might know how to swing a stick with relatively good aim now, thanks to all the trees he'd beaten up, but he wasn't stupid enough to try against _monsters_.

Tifa had martial arts training, though. Chances were she was going to need it too. Anyone who was squatting in the Shinra Mansion without anyone noticing wouldn't be good news, never mind her string connecting her to them.

Cloud considered the whole matter for a moment and then got up to go make a quick pit stop at home. He'd get one of his mom's knives, just in case.


	6. Chapter 6

The Shinra Mansion wasn't as infested with monsters as people believed, but there were some. They had built nests in the rafters and under the couches and skittered about when Cloud and Tifa entered the place – but mostly they seemed content not to attack. The few times they did, well.

It turned out a stick was a perfectly good weapon, when applied right. And Tifa was very good with her fists and feet and what Cloud's stick couldn't handle, she took care of.

"I thought this place would be scarier," Tifa commented, looking around. "Well it is a bit creepy but I thought it would be… dangerous creepy. You know?"

"Well of course. Got to keep those pesky townspeople out somehow. What better way than to make them fear the place," Cloud answered, examining a thing he'd found in one of the rooms. It was some sort of… two bladed knife thing. And two bladed meaning there were two separate arching blades with the handle between them. "What the hell is this?" he asked, turning it in his hand.

"I think it's one of those Wutaian throwing weapons?" Tifa asked, tilting her head.

"It has materia slots. Since when did Wutai weapons have materia slots?"

"Well, it looks kinda old. Might be pre-war or something." Tifa shrugged and looked down at her hand. "We're pretty much right above it now."

Her string had shifted steadily as they'd moved about, and was now pointing pretty much directly downwards. They looked at it a moment, waiting to see if it moved. If there was someone in the basement or some catacomb beneath, it should be obvious now if they were moving, but…

The string didn't budge.

"Down to the basement then?" Tifa asked.

"Yeah," Cloud nodded, hefting the weird throwing knife circle in his hand. For all of his research, he'd never looked into Wutai much. Might be a time to rectify that. Maybe.

The mansion above had _nothing_ on the basement below when it came to the creep factor. It was like a set from a horror movie, a mad scientist's laboratory. There was old looking equipment, enormous mako tanks, shelves and shelves full of phials and syringes and other sorts of medical equipment, plus half a hundred containers of suspicious looking materials, a lot of which _glowed_ in the dim light.

There was also an enormous library of old, important looking books and document folders which interested Cloud far more than the fact that Tifa's string led into a room full of coffins. Still he followed her, stick and his new Wutai weapon at the ready even if he had no idea how to use the thing. After all, the string meant that there was someone in the basement even if it looked empty and abandoned. That would have to be dealt with before he could safely look at the books.

"Um, C-Cloud?" Tifa asked when they stepped into the room and the string on her finger went from the small tight bit it usually was, and appeared fully. Cloud hadn't seen it happen between him and Rufus – he hadn't thought to look down then – but now he saw. It was… surprisingly mundane looking. It didn't shimmer into being, or even slowly appear by stages – it just snapped into place, tight and steady on her hand. Leading from said hand to one of the coffins.

"Shit," Cloud said eloquently.

"B-but the string is supposed to be go slack when the other person dies – it doesn't matter how close to the body you are, it goes slack regardless, because a dead body isn't supposed to have a soul, right?" Tifa asked almost desperately, looking between her hand and the coffin. "This shouldn't be happening!"

"Well it is," Cloud said, looking at her hand and then following the string. It definitely went into the coffin. "Want me to have a look?" he then offered – more due to the urge to get this over with than actual sympathy.

She hesitated and then steeled herself. "No – it's… it's my string," she said and then marched forward determinately.

There was, of course, a person in the coffin. A guy who looked pretty good for someone who, judging by the layer of dust and cobwebs around and on the coffin, had been there for years and years. A guy who… neither looked nor smelled _dead_.

"Looks like he's sleeping," Cloud muttered.

That was when the guy woke up, eyes snapping open and looking straight at Cloud and then turning to Tifa. Then, slowly, shifting down to the hand she was holding up, the hand with the string – the string which led to his own hand.

"H-hi?" Tifa said nervously, waving the string adorned hand. "U-um. I'm Tifa?"

For a moment the guy just stared at her in blank incomprehension and Cloud wondered with some unease if he'd looked at Rufus with the exact same expression – like someone had hit him over the head and he was still seeing stars. Then he wondered if the guy was paralysed because he wasn't moving at all, he didn't even look like he was _breathing_.

Judging by where they were, the guy had to be one of ShinRa… somethings. Either a worker or something worse. He was in Shinra Mansion – in ShinRa's lab. In a _coffin_ too, which meant that someone thought he'd died, or he'd been left for dead – or he'd crawled in himself to die. Whichever it was, it didn't speak of anything good having happened to the guy. Neither did the fact that the guy's left hand was covered in a golden gauntlet.

The string between him and Tifa led to the gauntlet, the string sinking into the golden metal surrounding his fifth finger, the curl around the actual finger invisible.

Then the guy was out of the coffin in a flash of red and on the other side of the room, by the doorway. He stared at Tifa, no longer surprised but _horrified_ and curiously Cloud looked between the two. They had the same black hair, and both had eyes which pretty much had to be called red. Like he and Rufus, they too would look like siblings if they stood next to each other.

"Um," Tifa said, nervous and uncertain. "W-what's your na –"

That was as far as she got, before the man turned around and just flat out ran out of the room. Tifa let out a choked, surprised sound, as the string snapped to its usual short length and then it swung wildly to the side, then up, and then to other side as her soulmate fled the basement and then the mansion entirely.

"Well… shit," Cloud said, eying the progress her string was making.

Tifa opened her mouth, looking down too and then let out a hurt, broken sound.

Judging by the looks of the string, the guy was about to flee Nibelheim entirely.

Tifa didn't stay for long after that. When the shock wore off she ran out as well, to chase after her soulmate or to see which way he was going, whichever it was, Cloud didn't care. Left behind in the mansion's basement, Cloud spent a moment looking around the coffin room – but the other coffins were empty, no weird living people in any of them.

Then, with fingers twitching, he headed to the library.

Judging by the looks of the books, most of them had to do with the science side of ShinRa – mainly, the super SOLDIER program, and all the research ShinRa had done on monsters way back when. Mako too, though the books on that subject were old and mostly theoretical rather than factual like the newer books at the library.

But there were other books – books which interested Cloud more than the science of SOLDIER and what happened to a person when Mako was pumped into them. History books, old business journals, books on business, things about power generation and electrical systems. Folders upon folders of old documents, decades of old business agreements and sales papers from ShinRa's past. And, the best of all, about ten old scrap books filled with articles from old newspapers – all of them having to do with ShinRa Electric Power Company back when it had been just one company among many, rather than the global superpower it was now.

It was very late in the night when Cloud finally ventured out of the mansion again, with every intention of heading back first thing the next day, school be damned. When his mother saw him, she opened her mouth to berate him for staying out so late, only for nothing to come out. There was a smile on Cloud's lips and for the first time in a year, it wasn't forced.

And it was probably all the more horrible because of it.


	7. Chapter 7

Cloud was expelled from school about a month after he and Tifa broke into the Shinra Mansion, mainly because he flat out stopped going to class. His mother shouted and cried and argued about it for a while and still forced him to go to see the counsellor every week, several times a week. But he wouldn't budge, wouldn't go, didn't want to waste the time.

His _research_ took all of his attention and time now.

The only saving grace he had was the fact that the thing he was spending so much time with had pretty much elevated him above his peers. Multiplication and division was _nothing_ when he was working his way through the basics of physics at a rapid pace in order to keep up the things he was learning from Shinra Mansion's library. While Tifa and the others were just starting on understanding geometry, Cloud was all but devouring differential and integral calculus.

Furious rage was a mighty powerful motivator, when it came to learning.

Tifa was his usual and somewhat unusual companion, though she didn't care for the things he was studying. She'd never managed to catch her soulmate – the man was out of Nibelheim before she'd gotten out of the mansion, it turned out, and hadn't been seen since then. Now her string was quietly and slowly moving from side to side as the man travelled further and further away, with Tifa tracking his movements on a map the same way Cloud had tracked Rufus before actually meeting him.

She was a quiet, determined girl now, not quite as carefree and easy to laugh as before. Everyone thought her soulmate was dead, what with her string being grey, so they were all understanding and sympathetic towards her. And she didn't say anything to the contrary. Cloud was pretty much the only one she ever let really look at her string at all. With everyone else, she tended to keep her hand down or behind her back, hiding the tautness and ever changing direction from people.

Cloud got the feeling that she thought he understood or sympathised or something. And maybe he did. He knew what that sort of disappointment felt like. She hadn't been… crushed like he had been, nor was she left feeling that all-consuming _hatred_ afterwards. She just felt betrayed and abandoned and alone – the way he refused to feel, but probably would've if Rufus had been at all nicer. Nevertheless, there was odd kinship in it – in knowing that one's soulmate was out there, and seemed to want nothing to do with you.

"I don't think he hated me, or disliked me," Tifa muttered, staring at the string in the dim light of the laboratory while Cloud devoured another engineering manual across from her. "I think he _feared_ me."

They'd learned the man's name from the mansion's archives. Vincent Valentine had been, according to his files, a Turk in ShinRa's employ once upon a time. Then he'd been killed in the line of duty and in accordance to ShinRa's oh so stellar ethics, his body had been made use of. That was probably why Tifa's string was grey – because Vincent _had_ died. In a way… Vincent was still dead.

Tifa had been sobbing wretchedly when they'd gone through the files on what had been done to Vincent. True, they didn't understand most of it at the time and a lot of it was still confusing. None of it though was particularly nice and in no way was any of it _moral_.

Afterwards it was a bit more understandable, the way the man had fled. To have all that happen – and then there's your soulmate, a nine year old girl? Must've been one hell of a kick in the teeth. The man certainly showed no signs of wanting to return either.

"Well, I'll just have to go to him, then," Tifa grumbled. "One day, I'm going to go find him. And I'm going hug the ever loving hell out of him."

"And after that?" Cloud asked, snorting.

She shrugged. "I'll figure it out then."

While she wasn't as furious about her preparations, she too was working for her goal in her way. Mainly, by training like a girl possessed. She'd been a good fighter before, but now she was quickly becoming a stellar one – so much so that her martial arts master, Zangan, was a little intimidated by her. Cloud was more so – though he definitely appreciated it when she decided that she needed a sparring partner who wasn't afraid of getting hit or squeamish about hitting a girl.

Cloud was afraid of neither thing. It was… oddly soothing actually, and it helped keep the pent up destructive impulses controlled. And he definitely didn't mind the training he got while at it either. He might've had none of her elegance or traditional training, but he had to develop some skill just as self-defence. And when he finally got good enough to land a hit… it was a good day.

In the end they beat up each other blue and purple so often that most people probably thought they had a vendetta going on – or would've, if they hadn't been spending so much time together in the public library. The friendship of Cloud Strife and Tifa Lockhart was weird and largely frowned upon, but most said nothing about it. Probably because Cloud was too disturbing and Tifa too terrifying and no one dared to make them mad.

Tifa's father did threaten Cloud on a regular basis, though. "Don't you dare try any funny business, Strife," he'd say, which Cloud thought was pretty hilarious, actually. As if he could ever get interested in anyone like that – there wasn't space in his emotional range for something as nice as that.

When Cloud turned ten, his mother decided that seeing he wasn't going to school anymore and since he had an obvious interest in engineering, he might as well help her at her job. She worked at the gas station that also worked as Nibelheim's only auto repair shop – and so, Cloud became first her unpaid errand boy and then, as weeks turned into months, her assistant.

Working around mako powered combustion engines wasn't quite what Cloud really wanted to do, but it was definitely a learning experience – and it helped a lot to put theoretical knowledge into practical frames. Lots of the information he'd accumulated only started making sense once he had that framework to launch from, and from there on things started to slowly take shape in his head – the plans he was making, the goals he had.

Before ShinRa had taken over the business and turned power generation into a mako enhanced monopoly, there had been other electrical companies – and other sources of power generation. Before the supremacy of mako, the majority of the world's electricity had come from the burning of coal and from oil – there were still a lot of old fossil fuel power plants around, now crumbling, abandoned ruins for the most part. The reason why mako had become as big of a thing as it did was simple. The subterranean oil reserves had been all but depleted and had gotten nearly impossible to find and coal had gotten harder and harder to find. Prices had sky rocketed.

ShinRa had originally been an oil company. It was during an excavation in order to try and unearth a new reservoir of oil that they'd struck mako instead. A mixture of luck, how deep they'd drilled and new, experimental technology they'd used in the drill bits, had resulted in the accidental first mako extraction. And after that, well.

In ten years mako replaced pretty much everything, from coal to oil to hydroelectricity and everything in between. Mako was seemingly plentiful – it wasn't just a single reservoir, no, mako _flowed_ and seemed to replenish, like an underground current of free energy. On top of that, a barrel of concentrated mako was as good as a hundred barrels of oil, when it came to energy yield. And only ShinRa had the secrets of its extraction and concentration.

The point was, though, there was a period of time in between when energy was scarce. When oil and coal were worth their weight in gold and before mako had become a widespread thing, there was an _energy crisis_. It eventually fuelled the success of mako – people were so starved for cheap energy that they reached for it with both hands. But during that crisis, a whole lot of experimental technology had been churned out by desperate scientists and even more desperate businessmen trying to keep their lights on and the money flowing. Some of those technologies had even made it into production, adopted by old and new power companies desperate to keep themselves floating.

When ShinRa had started growing in power one of the first things it had done was to buy out those companies – and scrap all the new tech before it had any chance of further development.

Now all Cloud could find about them were vague references. It took him _months_ of going back and forward between the mansion library and the public library to piece it together. There were two – or technically, three – types of technology Shinra had all but _erased_ from common knowledge.

First was the older type – windmills. There used to be wind _farms_ out there – one not very far from Nibelheim actually. Twenty enormous windmills, capable of producing enough electricity to power a town four times the size of Nibelheim. ShinRa had scrapped them all.

Second – and third – was solar – and that was infinitely harder for Cloud to figure out because the information about it was close to nonexistent now. There were two types. Concentrated solar energy, which was basically mirrors aimed at a single point, where they heated an element, usually a boiler of sort, to create heat, to turn that heat into steam, to use that steam to power… whatever. And second, a technology that had been in its bare _infancy_ before its destruction… photovoltaics.

ShinRa had done all in its power to erase them from common knowledge as quick as it could. And of course it would. It was free energy from the wind and from the sun, costing only what it took to make the components of the arrays. Worse yet, they could've been produced in smaller scale. Personal scale. _Consumer scale_. They could've given people the ability to produce their own electricity, no power companies needed.

Renewable, free energy. Cloud knew the moment he pieced it all together that he'd found his weapon of choice.

"You're insane, you know that, right?" Tifa asked, when she finally figured out what he was actually working towards, what he was so furiously trying to do. "It'll never work."

"I'll just figure out a way to make it work," he answered.

"If ShinRa destroyed the renewable energy tech before, what do you think they'd do now, if someone started working on something like that? The way ShinRa is now, with their Turks and SOLDIER and army and all that?" she arched her eyebrows. "You know what they do to their workers. Imagine what they'd do to their _enemies_."

Cloud grimaced. Vincent and what had been done to him was a very clear proof of what ShinRa was capable. "Then… I'll make sure they don't find out," he said. "Somehow I'll hide it, until it's too late to stop it."

"How?"

Cloud scowled. How indeed.


	8. Chapter 8

At eleven Cloud made his first photovoltaic… thing. It couldn't really be called a cell, nor a device, nor anything really. It was basically just a sheet of plastic with a thin layer of polycrystalline silicone wafers on it, shaved painstakingly over the months from the remains of computer chips, with a mess of copper wiring more holding the thing together than actually conducting electricity. It produced a grand total of 0.003 watts. Per hour.

Not exactly awe striking but considering that he was working mostly blind with no manuals, no guides and with the barest hint of knowledge, well. It was something.

"So, how is this more special than… I dunno, anything else?" Tifa asked, eying the messy thing.

"Well… for one, it doesn't require a generator of any sort," Cloud said – and then had to explain to her how electricity is usually produced. Mako, coal, oil, even hydroelectricity was pretty much the same in the end – they were all basically used to transfer heat/kinetic/whatever energy into electrical energy by the use of electromagnetic induction, aka, rotating electromagnetic fields. Basically, spinning lots of conductive material, like say, copper wire, around a magnet.

"Your basic EMF generation," Cloud shrugged. "Photovoltaics though don't do that – they don't need an actual generator. They just take light and turn it into electricity and that's it. You can't hook mako into an outlet. You can hook a solar panel though. You know, with the appropriate converters and all that."

"Okay…" she said, looking down at the solar cell Cloud had made. "And how do they do that, the light thing?"

Tifa ended up learning a lot of electrical engineering from Cloud, though how much of it stuck with her he wasn't entirely sure. It didn't matter though – as long as she got the basic concept, she was way ahead of the majority of the other people on the planet.

"It's butt-ugly though," she commented, making to poke at the cell, only to get her hand slapped. "If they all look like this, they're kind of obvious to anyone who knows what they are, right? Like, say… ShinRa people."

"Yeah, that's the problem," Cloud agreed sighing. That, and the fact that they were freaking hard to make. There was no way he could find enough appropriate silicone for even another small cell, never mind an actual panel, and even if he could, then it would take an _enormous_ amount of panels to make a difference. With just one of them being so obvious, a full array would be like a big, enormous bull's-eye. Look here, some people trying to one up ShinRa, let's bomb them.

"What would a full panel look like?" Tifa asked. "How big would it have to be to be any use?"

"Big, bigger, enormous," Cloud sighed, sketching one out on a notepad, colouring the cells in with the flat of the pencil tip. "A meter in width and two in length, maybe. And you'd need about… a hundred of these to power Nibelheim. And that's only if I could get better yield out of the semiconductors – which means actually producing them myself, rather than just taking second hand from computer chips. Which mean… well, I'd probably need a million gil to start with. Factory, workers with the right know how. Equipment that probably doesn't actually exist. Shit like that."

"So pretty much impossible, huh?" Tifa asked, giving him a look. "Plus a hundred of these things would be really freaking obvious."

"Not impossible, just freakishly hard," Cloud said, scowling and squeezing his left hand into a fist. "I'll figure it out, damn it. There has to be another way to do it."

The main issue, the first he tackled, was making the solar cells… unnoticeable. They couldn't be black and blue and gleaming like the silicon waver cells were, those were too obvious and easily identifiable by anyone who actually knew what a solar panel was. If he ever wanted this to work without ShinRa swooping in to put a quick and brutal end to it, he had to… _disguise_ the tech, somehow.

But how the hell do you disguise something that was black and blue and tended to gleam in the sunlight?

That whole winter Cloud spent in his mother's garage, toiling away at a work desk scraping bits and pieces of metal off scavenged computer and machine parts, trying every semi-conductive material he could get his hands on. Germanium, what felt like a hundred copper mixtures, gadmium telluride, he even managed to scrap a bit of indium gallium arsenide together after half a month of toiling at it.

In the end, they all looked… well, not much different from the first silicon cell. Very obvious, very blatant, very telling. And they were all way too damn hard to make on top of everything else.

It was infuriating _._ Especially since every time he ran into a wall that caused his thought process to stutter, there it would be again. That damn voice, in the back of his head, as sharp as ever even though had been years now.

_Is he stupid? He looks stupid. Such a wimpy, stupid looking boy at that… Is he stupid?_

"Shut the FUCK UP!" Cloud roared at the voice more than once, and quite a number of his earlier projects ended up flung at the walls and broken beyond repair. Three, almost four years, and Rufus was still in his fucking head, still speaking that stupid bullshit, day in and day out and he couldn't get _rid of him_.

"Why won't it go away?" he asked the school counsellor once almost plaintively in a moment of weakness, when he was hopelessly stuck with the solar cell project and the memories wouldn't go away.

She just gave him a sympathetic wince. "That's… how first meetings are. They're memorable."

They were one fucking point where every person on the planet had an eidetic memory. No one ever forgot – which was fine for most people. For most people it was _nice_ , to meet their soulmate.

"It wasn't nice for me either," Tifa commented when he complained about it. "Mind you, Vincent didn't say anything nasty or anything at all, but… it's not like I can forget either."

The more stuck he got with the solar cell project, the worse the memories got. At the worst time of that winter, he all but hunted down Tifa on a daily basis, to take his frustration out on her – and she always gave it back twice as hard as she got. It helped some. When he was too bruised and too exhausted to do much, he wasn't destroying what little equipment he had managed to cobble together anyway. But it was still a bad winter all around – so much so that his mother stopped bringing him to the repair shop and started staying late there herself, to avoid being around him.

His string got worse too. So much so that people stopped ignoring it uneasily and started pointing it out to him. "I think it's just very sad," one of the old ladies in the grocery store would say. "You really should think about letting it go. It's not healthy, you know."

Cloud seriously considered stabbing her with the pliers he'd just bought. He was officially announced to have an _anger problem_ that winter. It was just fan-fucking-tastic.

It was true, though. The more time passed, the worse his soul string looked. It had been bad enough when it had just started changing colour, turning murky dark red for a while, almost black. Then it had stared to… twist weirdly into a sort of greenish colour. But now?

It was getting _frayed_ , like his hatred for Rufus was actually harming the soul string. Who knew. Maybe it was. It was harder and harder to ignore it anyway. Sometimes Cloud would swear he could actually feel it, strangling the finger it was wrapped around.

Like fuck he could _let it go_ when it wouldn't let him go. He'd let go when his string went grey, maybe.

"Okay, _you_ need a break," Tifa decided one day, after finding Cloud brooding angrily over some demolished computer bits. "Come on, come on. We're doing something else today. Something not related to electronics or ShinRa or soulmates or anything like that. Come _on_ already."

She dragged him away from the garage and to the school where there was an honest to god arts and crafts club going on. It was mostly old ladies and stay at home moms and some random kids from around the town the others had dragged with them, doing stuff like paper crafts and painting. One of them was actually twisting and weaving strands of paper together, turning it into a _basket_.

"You're kidding me, right?" Cloud asked with horrified disbelief.

"No. Sit your ass down, Strife. We're making nonsensical pretty crap today and you're going to like it," Tifa said, with determined look on her face. "And if you even _think_ of slipping out, I will hunt you down and stomp your balls through the floor. Don't think I won't."

Cloud didn't slip out, but he didn't make much nonsensical pretty crap that day either. A couple of the kids wanted to print stuff in colour, and it turned out that the school printer was broken – it was Cloud's salvation from the arts and crafts, and instead of being forced to paint, he spent the arts and crafts hour fixing the printer, clearing the paper shoot of all the junk and refitting the ink cartridges.

Then he stared at the machine in dumbfounded astonishment.

Printing. _Printing_.

How many broken printers had he seen while hunting down computer chips? Bits and pieces and parts galore, both from the townspeople's personal printers and from ShinRa's leftovers. There were several printers in the mansion too.

Printing was just applying a _coating_ on a material. The fact that it tended to be ink was… really irrelevant. With a bit of fiddling and modifying, he could probably make a printer that could print… anything.

All he needed… was photovoltaic _ink_ and he could turn _anything_ into a solar cell. And it wouldn't gleam and glimmer like crystalline silicone wafers either! And with a printer he could control the thickness of the coating. And the _colour_. And the resulting solar cell wouldn't even have to be rigid, if he did it right. He could print it on paper, put on a thin plastic sheet over it to protect it from the elements, and that would be it.

He could print on _fabric_ if it came down to it.

"Oh my god," Cloud murmured, staring at the printer. "I can actually do this."

Sure, he had to _invent_ a photovoltaic material that could be printed, that would probably take months if not years, and he would still need some specialised equipment to produce it, not to mention the materials to actually make the printing material but…

 _Is he stupid_?

No, he fucking wasn't.


	9. Chapter 9

It took Cloud over a year to figure out how to make photovoltaic ink. In that time he pretty much took over his mother's garage, in fact he all but moved there, spreading out a mattress in the corner so that he could keep on tinkering with chemicals, trying to find the right mixture. He also pretty much burned away his fingerprints, but that was irrelevant.

The only reason he didn't become a total recluse to society was because Tifa wouldn't let him. Because of the so called _success_ of the first arts and crafts club session, she decided to keep dragging him to the rest of them. Cloud spent most of them doing his own thing – mainly sketching calculations and chemical formulas and churning out theoretic applications for printable solar cells. Sometimes though – usually with Tifa's knuckles digging painfully into his kidneys – he did take part in the actual crafts. Usually whenever there was metal working involved.

Much to his own disgust, he was surprisingly good with filigree.

"So, when you start printing them, what are you going to print them as?" Tifa asked while they were making silly necklaces, glass gems in filigree frames, nothing fancy. "They still need to cover a lot of ground, right?"

"Hm," Cloud hummed. However and whenever he succeeded in making the actual panels, they would need to take up a lot of space, to get as much sunlight as possible. On top of that, the printed solar cells probably wouldn't be as good as the silicon wafer ones.

"And you still need to disguise them," Tifa added. "Otherwise someone will just, I dunno. Blow them up."

"Hm," Cloud agreed.

"I've been thinking," she said and held out her half made necklace. She was using a flat piece of oval shaped glass in hers. "Can you make the stuff transparent?" she asked, and lifted the necklace so that the light of the overhead lamps shone through the glass. "I mean… every house needs windows, you know."

Cloud blinked, looking at the necklace. Then he did a double take. "Tifa," he said. "You… are a genius."

"I have my moments," she said, smiling sweetly.

Of course that presented its own problems, but now that Tifa had given him the idea it burrowed into his head and wouldn't get out. If he could make photovoltaic glass – or most likely, layered glass, with a front of glass, contract film, transparent layer of some semi-conductive material, back contact film, another layer of glass… it would have more applications. It would be less efficient overall, since it would obviously have to let some light through instead of using it and converting it, but…

It would be easier to hide for one – and much easier to put into, well anything that used glass. Windows, yes, but also sun roofs. In his most positive moments, Cloud imagined a greenhouse completely made of photovoltaic glass, no one having _any_ idea that the whole thing was producing electricity. Plus, if he got the printing working, he could make _floor tiles_ that would absorb what sunlight the glass wouldn't. He could make photovoltaic wall paper. He could make _anything_.

It was a thing a long ways off. But it was a nice goal have.

It was a little before he turned thirteen that he managed to make his fist photovoltaic ink – which didn't destroy the printer, nor did it instantly flake off the plastic sheet he printed it on. Well, it took four inks and four printers to actually make – and a whole day to finish – his first functional printed solar cell and it was only one sided and very far from being transparent. But it worked.

"It won't be fully transparent," Cloud admitted, when he and Tifa tested the cell in full day light. 0.41 watts. Not bad, for a fifteen by twenty centimetres piece plastic prototype. "I can probably eventually make it transparent, but it will be sort of… blurry probably."

"Hmm…" she answered, staring at the volt meter. "You know what no one would ever suspect to be in any way high tech?" she asked. "Stained glass painting."

"Huh?" Cloud asked.

She grinned. "Make it pretty and make it artsy and people will expect it to be pretty and artsy and that's it. Art, after all, is rarely functional. My mom, you know," she smiled sadly. "She used to make stained glass stuff. We still have some around the house. These little things hanging over the windows. The cleaning lady hates them because they just get in the way and _have no purpose_. You know?"

Cloud blinked and leaned back. "Maybe," he murmured, thinking about it furiously. "Maybe."

"Plus, once you manage to actually make this stuff work, you need to get it out somehow. You need to get people to buy it and use it," she added, grinning. "And you need to do it without ShinRa hearing about this young up and coming solar engineer, right? So. Do it as an _artist_. Who would suspect an artist after all."

Cloud eyed her with undisguised amazement. "Where do you get these ideas from?" he asked.

"Hey, I'm not a complete idiot. And it's not like you haven't been moaning about this for _years_. I've had time to think on it too," she said, grinning. "Besides… I want you to make it. I want this to work out. I want you to kick ShinRa's ass and bring them down as much as you do."

Cloud hesitated and then nodded, turning away. "Yeah, I guess you do," he said awkwardly. He sometimes forgot that she too had a reason to hate ShinRa. Not just because ShinRa and people involved with it were horrible, but because of the things they'd done. It was personal for her too.

The fact that she wanted to do it _for_ her soulmate, rather than against him, well. He wasn't really able to wrap his mind around that. Sympathy for a soulmate wasn't a thing he did, after all. Especially since she, like he, hadn't seen or heard from her soulmate in a long, long while.

"You know," he said quietly. "When I get this really working… I'm probably going to move out. Once I start making actual panels, I want to make them somewhere where they won't get snowed on. And Nibelheim gets a lot of snow in winter."

"Huh," she said. "I didn't even think of that. Where are you going to go?"

"Cosmo Canyon," Cloud answered promptly.

Cosmo Canyon, according to the rumours, still had some renewable energy tech. Windmills, mainly. Plus it was pretty much off ShinRa's radar, because of the local geology – it was impossible to pump _anything_ in Cosmo Canyon, never mind Mako. The ground was too brittle for mining; it would cause too many collapses. If ShinRa would try building a Mako reactor there, chances were the ground would collapse under it and then it would just sink into the earth.

And on top of that, Cosmo Canyon was known for its _eco friendliness_. The people living there were by and all considered to be silly earth loving bums that did nothing to contribute to society. No one took them seriously. If Cloud went there… no one would take _him_ seriously. Especially if he started making his solar panels in the guise of _art_. No one would ever expect a Cosmo Canyon hippie to be in any way a threat to ShinRa.

And Cosmo Canyon got the highest concentration of sunlight, right after the deserts a little further east. It would be perfect.

Tifa considered that for a moment and then nodded. "When?" she asked.

"Couple years maybe. As soon as I can," Cloud said. "I need to get the tech into a solid state first, so that I can move it. And I need a car – or well, a truck really – so I need to get some funds together and stuff."

She nodded at that. "Yeah," she said and looked down at the solar cell and the volt meter. Then she smiled. "I guess I need to get a job too," she said thoughtfully. "And start saving."

"Huh?"

"You didn't think I was just going to _stay behind_ when you headed out? No way. I'm going," she said. "I wanna help you. Besides, Vincent is somewhere out there, and I'm not going to find him by rotting here in Nibelheim, am I? No, I'm coming with." She snorted and shook her head. "Besides, if you leave, people will expect me to go along."

Cloud grimaced at that. As they'd gotten older, people had started getting an… impression of their friendship. It was easy being just friends when they were kids, but Tifa was already thirteen – and people thought her soulmate was dead. And with Cloud's string now being a dark, hateful green, well. When people looked at them, they saw certain things. Even Major Lockhart thought they were _looking for comfort where they could_. It was ridiculous.

The fact that they saw it didn't make them like it any better, of course, not with Cloud's soulmate still obviously alive. No, Tifa and Cloud were both now frowned upon and chastised, Cloud especially. Some people even tried to _shame_ him. How dare he cheat on his soulmate like that, had he no shame, didn't he have any heart. What a horrible, horrible boy he was. No wonder his mother was so ashamed of him.

He wasn't sure if his mother _was_ ashamed of him. She was tired of him and his bipolarity and occasional bursts of anger, though. She'd… pretty much given up on him. They hadn't talked more than a couple words a day if even that to each other since he'd stopped working at the repair shop.

"Yeah," he murmured and glanced at her. "You don't have to come but if you do… I wouldn't mind it if you did."

"I love you too, you idiot," she said, wrapping an arm around his shoulders. "Even if you are a constantly raging ball of hate, you're not so bad."

"Nice. Thanks," Cloud muttered, scowling.

It kind of was though.


	10. Chapter 10

The first real solar panel Cloud made wasn't as much a _panel_ as it was a rug. A rubber carpet actually from his mother's garage, which was previously used to cover an unappealing hole in the paint on the floor. A meter and half in width and two and three quarters in length and made of thick, barely yielding rubber, it was heavy and unwieldy, but it could be rolled up and manipulated better than a piece of plywood – his first option for the panel base – was.

It took him all winter to print out the solar cells. He printed them on plastic sheets which he'd pretty much stolen from the school – several packets of transparencies which were never going to be used because the school projectors had long since burned out and no one could fix them. Each cell took two transparencies – one as a base, onto which he printed out the p-junction contact film first, then the layer of what had finally become his preferred semiconductor, a type of graphene silicon germanium blend mixed in with whatever adhesive he could easily get his hands on. It had taken a lot of tinkering to get the blend just right, but eventually he had managed to get it to come out as a faintly greyish gloss, rather than as a near black film. With an n-junction contact film over the semiconductor blend, the actual solar cell was finished – and the second layer of transparency went over it, to protect it from the elements.

The whole process would actually work better once he started making it from glass. He had tried it and the glass cells came out much more durable – the semiconductor blend was decent, but it was fragile as all get out. Bend the solar cell too much, and it would just shatter – and it would be impossible to tell that it had either, because the break would be so minimal.

Still, they worked. Getting the wiring to work had been a bit of a bother, but once he figured out that he could print the junction layers to be bigger than the actual semiconducting layer, it got easier. And once he had that working, well…

All he had to do was staple them on the rubber carpet, finish laying out the wiring properly and he had a fully functional solar panel.

"A hundred and twenty? Really?" Tifa asked, when they carried the thing out of Nibelheim proper to see how it took the sunlight. The volt meter was jumping between 121.5 and 120.9, but it stayed steadily over 120 volts. "That's the most you've ever gotten."

"Yeah," Cloud murmured, poking at the wiring and watching the volt meter. It stayed about steady. It still wasn't as good as he would've liked – he was only getting about 32% yield of the available light. It was about as good as he was going to get with transparent solar cells, though. The semiconductor blend he'd ended up settling with didn't take all of the light, of course – that was the whole point. But he doubted that even if he tried making non-transparent solar cells using the same method he probably wouldn't get more than 40-45% yield.

"Well, it's better than nothing," he said.

"Yeah," Tifa said, shaking her head at him. "It's definitely better than nothing. Now what, though?"

Cloud took a breath and released it. "Now I try and get one of those old electric trucks," he said.

"Electric trucks?"

"Yeah. Pre-Mako trucks were mostly electric – gas was too expensive, so people started making electric vehicles for a while. Anyway," Cloud pointed at the solar panel. "Why do you think I made this? I want an electric truck, then I'll put this on the roof. It won't be enough to charge the whole thing in one go, no way, but over time it's… well, better than nothing."

"Huh," Tifa answered. "So, we're about ready to leave then?" she asked, squeezing her left hand into a fist.

"Yeah," Cloud agreed. "I just need a truck to pack all my things into."

Tifa gave him a look. "Can you even drive?"

"Well… no, actually," Cloud said somewhat sheepishly. "Mom has the qualification to teach and approve licences, though. I'm… going to ask her."

That didn't go too well – his mother did give him a couple of lessons and Cloud did pick up the skill enough not to crash his mother's car into anything. They spent most of the lessons shouting at each other about all the things they hadn't talked about in years – mainly, about Cloud's anger issues.

"You haven't even tried to work your way through it, haven't move past that… that _boy_ – and now you're just going to leave, just like that?" she asked, furious and frustrated. "And I guess you're going to take Mayor Lockhart's daughter with you too! And what are you going to do, where are you going to go?"

"I'm going to do what I can't do here! Tifa's the only one who's ever actually understood – it's not like you or anyone has ever tried to really help me. And you know just as well as fucking everybody that you can't _work_ your way _through_ shit like that!" Cloud squeezed the steering wheel nearly hard enough to twist the leather covering it. "You're just pretending it's fucking fixable, that if I just try harder it's going to be all better, well it's fucking _not_! And it's really freaking easy for you to say that too – you _loved_ your soulmate. You don't know how it feels to –"

And so on. Fun times were had by no one, but in the end his mother pronounced him qualified enough, approved his licence – even paid for the printing. Then, with a miserable look on her face, she called herself quits with him.

One day Cloud knew he would regret all of it – regret taking it out on her, on everybody. One day he'd regret alienating her, and more than that he'd regret making her so sad. One day he'd realise that she'd _lost_ her soulmate long ago, so long that he couldn't remember his father at all – and a thing like that sapped a person's energy like nothing else. She simply didn't have the strength to deal with him and one day… one day he'd understand that.

That day he was just bitter though – and he and his mother didn't talk a word to each other after that.

It took him a couple of weeks to find a suitable truck in the newspaper ads – a '56 model EV Flatnose, made by a company that had long since gone under and all but vanished from memory. It had eight electric motors – one for each of the six wheels and one for every other function and one spare – and, most importantly, it carried a battery bank of sixteen lithium ion batteries beneath the cargo space, ten of which had been added in later by the owner who'd eventually gotten them from other similar trucks and cars cheap when the interest in electric vehicles had pretty much died out.

Cloud got it dirt cheap for two reasons: no one made spare parts for the thing and no one made electric motors like the one the truck had. If anything in the thing broke, it was so much scrap metal afterwards. And two, charging it was costly and borderline impossible these days. Once upon a time there'd been charging stations for electric vehicles. Once upon a time, they'd even thought of fitting gas stations with charging stations. These days… the only place you could charge an electric vehicle was your own garage.

Still, it took all of his savings and a chunk from Tifa's to pay for the thing.

The person selling it – an old trucker who'd had the thing pretty much gathering dust in his warehouse for the better part of twenty years now – was kind enough to drive it all the way from Corel to Nibelheim, free of charge. "Gotta admit, I was a bit curious why you'd want a truck like this. Been trying to sell it for years," the trucker said when he presented Cloud with the truck. It had naked ladies painted along the sides and a dragon in the cab cover and it looked all around very tacky.

"I got my reasons," Cloud said, handing the man his money and bidding him a friendly piss-off. His reasons were mainly the fact that the thing had been cheap, was made for rough terrain and unlike most people… Cloud could charge the thing without having to sell his soul. Eventually. One day. Hopefully.

The first thing he and Tifa did to the truck – while the people of Nibelheim muttered and disproved – was to spread out the solar panel over the trailer top. Cloud wired it into the batteries with two different energy converters in between - and then waited. The batteries took about 20 kWh each, which meant it took about… _forever_ to charge them with the solar panel.

"It'll take about, oh… two hundred hours to charge one of them?" Cloud answered when Tifa asked. "Give or take. And that's two hundred hours of full sunlight. And without actually subtracting in the energy I lose when I convert from the DC the solar panel puts out to AC, which is what the batteries take."

"That's how bad the solar panel is?!" she asked incredulously.

"Yep," Cloud said and shrugged. "Why do you think I want to cover every available surface with solar cells?"

"So we have to wait – what, with about six hours a day of full sunlight, without counting in the cloudy bits…"

"About… two years?" Cloud asked, feigning disinterest.  "Five hundred and thirty three days to be exact. Given six hours of sunlight per day, of course, and most winters we're lucky if we get two in Nibelheim."

"We will have to wait _two years_ to charge your damn _truck_?!"

Cloud grinned at her. "You're hilarious. No, of course not," he said and held out a power chord. "I'm going to charge the thing from mom's garage's outlet. I just wanted to wire the solar panel in for testing purposes – to see if I could. Because I got a feeling once we get to Cosmo Canyon the batteries will be our main source of power."

She stared at him incredulously and then shoved at his shoulder. "You are an asshole. I thought for a moment we'd be stuck in Nibelheim for another two years!" she said.

Cloud just laughed – his first real laugh in over five years, he realised much later.

They left Nibelheim with some fanfare about two weeks later, after they'd packed the truck full of Cloud's equipment and whatever essentials they could get their hands on. Mayor Lockhart was _not happy_ about any of it and threatened to set the truck on fire more than once, but after Tifa had threatened to set his balls on fire if he did, he stopped.

"But sweetheart –"

"No, daddy. I'm going, and if you try and stop me you'll regret it until the day you die," she said firmly and then softened a bit. "It isn't as if we'll never see each other again. I'll visit. And write letters. And phones are a thing in Cosmo Canyon too, I bet."

In the end Major Lockhart was forced to bend – he even pitched in, buying them a set of dishware and a whole box of linens to take with them and then pulling Cloud aside to threaten him with castration if he got Tifa pregnant "before she was old enough."

"I'm not going to get her pregnant at _all_!" Cloud answered, horrified at the thought. "Seriously, Mayor, it's never going to happen!" The man didn't believe him, of course, but he seemed to find Cloud honest enough, so he let him go without actually castrating him there and then. Cloud avoided the man the rest of the time they spend in Nibelheim, just in case.

"One last thing," Tifa said when they were done packing away things like mattresses and a foldable table and pair of chairs and little things like that. "You, my hateful friend, need a haircut."

"No I don't," Cloud answered indifferently.

"Yes you do, Cloud, you look like a haystack. I swear your hair is matted in parts. You _need_ a haircut."

The only hairdresser in Nibelheim looked _relieved_ when Tifa sat Cloud down in chair in front of her. "So how would you like it?" she asked, scissors already in hand and ready to cut the hair right off.

Cloud looked at himself. It was only then that he realised that it had been about four years since his last hair cut – and probably as much time since the last time he'd _brushed_ his hair either. His own looks and general appearance hadn't meant much to him in his frantic search for solar, so he'd… let himself go a bit. All he did with the hair most of the time was tie it back and out of his way and then he forgot it. Now his hair reached his shoulder blades in long, partially matted tangles.

On top of that, he was thin to the point of looking starved, and with some confusion he realised he wasn't sure what he'd been eating for the last… several years, actually. Something probably since he wasn't _dead_ but it apparently hadn't been quite enough. No wonder people of Nibelheim looked at him like he was something dirty.

When was the last time he'd even looked in the mirror?

Then it came to him – the blond hair, the blue eyes. _Rufus_. Cloud had stopped looking in mirrors when he'd realised how much he looked like Rufus did. When he'd turned ten, he and Rufus – the Rufus he'd met when he'd been eight – could've passed for twin brothers.

If he cut his hair now would he look like Rufus did, wherever he was? With his blue eyes and his blond hair, all neat and proper? Probably. They _were_ soulmates after all.

Cloud narrowed his eyes. The tangles had to go, that was true enough. But no way in _fucking hell_ was he ever going to get a nice proper business cut. "Hey," he said, glancing back at the hairdresser, a determined gleam in his eyes. "Can you do… unconventional haircuts?"

It was the last straw in the impropriety of Cloud Strife and the people of Nibelheim definitely seemed happy to see the back of him, when he emerged from the hair salon with a satisfied grin – and a slightly lopsided, proud mohawk.


	11. Chapter 11

"Stop it," Cloud snapped when Tifa went to play with his hair again.

"But it's so… so, fluffy!" she giggled, ruffling her fingers through the mohawk and over the stubble at the sides. "And scruffy and stubbly and –!"

"I will hit you," Cloud growled, trying to duck away. "Or run into something – I'm driving here!"

And he had been driving for the better part of three days. The roads in the Cosmo Canyon area were atrocious and hadn't seen maintenance since their original creation, probably, if even then. Though the roads hadn't been all that better in the Nibel Area, really – and Cloud would probably have nightmares about the bridge they'd crossed to get over the Southern River and to the southern part of the Western Continent. Now they were slowly bumbling along in the endless, mazelike ravines and valleys of Cosmo Canyon, trying to find the actual town that was supposed to be somewhere in there.

He was really, _really_ glad that the previous owner of the truck had added additional batteries to the truck. If they'd been trying this with the original bank of six batteries the truck would've died on them already. As it was, the readouts didn't make Cloud feel all that confident. They were past half power already. A couple more days of driving and they'd be dead in the water – or dead in the _desert_ which was worse – and then they really would have to wait for a couple of years for the batteries to charge via the solar panel.

"We should be about there now," Tifa said, looking between her map and the view outside the truck's cab. "Or at least near. Should we, I dunno, stop and climb something to check if we can see anything."

"Might as well," Cloud said and pulled to a halt. "I need to take a piss anyway."

Cosmo Canyon was _hot_ , hotter than he'd imagined. It was weird to think that there wasn't all that much space between Nibelheim, which took _frosty_ to new and uncomfortable heights, and Cosmo Canyon, which in shade was nearly thirty degrees Celsius. But then, Nibelheim wasn't so cold because it was north – no, Nibelheim was about as close to the planet's equator as Cosmo Canyon was, actually. The problem in Nibelheim was that it was so high up. There was nearly a kilometre's worth of elevation between Cosmo Canyon and Nibelheim – and thanks to the currents of the Eastern Wutai Bay, the winds that blew over to the Nibel Region were _cold_.

Intellectually Cloud knew that, intellectually he'd prepared for the heat. In practice though…

"Why is all my clothing dark?" he asked plaintively while climbing after Tifa, trying to get up and onto a mound of layered rock next to their truck.

"Because you're a gloomy, brooding recluse with only darkness in your heart. And also an idiot," she answered. She, of course, had a white shirt and creamy shorts and had been smarter than him in the sense that she'd brought a sunhat. "Come on, already. We're almost at the top."

"I hate you with all of the darkness in my heart," Cloud answered flatly. By the time he made it, his arms and legs where both shaking and he had to sit down to keep himself from toppling over. But he made it, and it turned out to be worth it.

There was a… well, it was maybe a town. Or outpost of some sort anyway. It was a little further away and a little hard to see at the distance. It was on what looked like a plateau, or at least a larger open space, and the outpost thing was built on the single ledge that jutted into it, with what looked like a space observatory on top.

"It looks kinda small," Tifa commented. "And ramshackle."

"Second thoughts?" Cloud asked.

"No. I'm just wondering if I can have a shower there," she said and stretched before peering up. "You're definitely right about the sun, though. How can it be so much hotter here? And why is the air so… thick here?"

"It's not thick here – it's just thin in Nibelheim," Cloud shrugged and sat down with a sigh. "We'll get used to it."

They spent yet another night sleeping in the back of the truck, on the mattresses they'd brought with them just in case. The next morning, after yet another dry and cold breakfast, Cloud took the wheel again and turned the truck towards the outpost they'd seen.

There was no way to drive up to the actual town – it had been built high up and either without vehicles in mind or with every intention of keeping vehicles _away_. The only way up was a set of stairs. A long, long set of stairs.

"Just imagine it. Hauling all our stuff up that. Going back and forth, lugging printers and boxes and stuff. In this heat," Tifa said with dry humour. "Doesn't it just make you giddy with anticipation?"

Cloud just glared at the stairs.

They did make their way up after Cloud had locked the truck – and it did take a long, long while to get up there. By the time they did, they'd attracted quite a crowd to the outer edge of the Cosmo Canyon town, where people were peering over the edge and watching them and the truck with interest.

"And who are you?" a man at the top of the stairs asked, half curious and half suspicious.

"Tired, annoyed, sunburned and really, really thirsty," Cloud answered irritably. "Who are _you_?"

"Ignore him," Tifa answered. "He's an idiot and bad with people. I'm Tifa Lockhart and this is Cloud Strife. He's very right about the being thirsty bit, though," she added, wiping sweat of her brow. "Should've thought to bring a bottle."

"Your parents coming up too?" the man asked suspiciously.

"Not parents, just us," Tifa said cheerfully, though with steel in her voice.

"Who drove the truck then?"

"I did," Cloud said impatiently. "Do you interrogate everyone who comes here?"

The man considered it. "Yes. We do," he admitted. "How old are you kids?"

"Old enough to kick your fu –" Cloud stopped short, Tifa's hand clasped tightly around his mouth.

"We're old _enough,_ " she said firmly, while Cloud nailed her on the side with his elbow.

A little old man nearby cleared his throat. "That's one of the old EV trucks, isn't it? Looks like a Ricyc, with that nose. A mid-fifties model too. Didn't think there was any of them still around," he commented, peering down at the flatnose truck with a pair of taped up binoculars. He glanced at Tifa and Cloud – turning the binoculars and peering through them. "You do realise it'll be impossible to charge its batteries here, right? There are no reactors here."

"Don't need 'em," Cloud said, wriggling away from Tifa and looking at the old man and then around them at the other people. With dismay he realised that this place wasn't a _town_ per say. It was a community. A private, probably somewhat closed community at that – the sort of place where everyone knew everyone and everyone worked together. The sort of place that wasn't even supposed to exist these days.

The sort of place that would be extremely suspicious of any new comers showing up unannounced.

Then his eyes caught the sight of the windmills. They were mounted on almost every rooftop and every ledge, made of what looked like whatever the people had had on hand. Scrap metal, wood – one had just the barest framework of wings, filled in with plastic sheets. There had to be twenty, thirty of them - small and big alike. They were all spinning, some lazily and some wildly in the near constant breeze of Cosmo Canyon.

"So it's true," he murmured, a desperate sort of clench in his belly. "You really use wind power here."

"You like our windmills?" the old man asked, glancing up. "They're a bit make-do I admit, but they serve us well enough. Enough to let us light our houses and power the water pumps and the few coolers we have around here."

"What kind of turbines do you use?" Cloud asked, unable to help himself. He'd looked into wind power too – which had been easier, there was more knowledge about it still around. He'd discarded it because windmills were _very_ obvious and pretty much impossible to disguise. The fact that he'd decided not to make them himself didn't make him any less interested though.

The old man lowered the binoculars and looked at him a bit more closely but didn't answer.

"Kinetic or electro-magnetic?" Cloud asked curiously.

"Kinetic, mainly," the old man answered slowly. "Couple are EMF turbines, though. You know something about wind turbines?"

"I know theory," Cloud answered, stepping past the guard to see if he could peer under one of the windmills, to see how they'd rigged the actual turbines. "Solar is more my thing. You rotate the turbines manually when the wind turns, to face it?"

"Have to," one of the nearby Cosmo Canyon residents said, exchanging looks with the old man. "Otherwise we miss most of the wind."

"Huh," Cloud said. "Why not build vertical turbines then?"

"We get a lot of gust winds here – vertical windmills tend to stall in gust winds. We have some further up the mountain though, where the wind is steadier," the old man said, giving Cloud an apprising look. "Solar, you said?"

Cloud nodded down towards the stairs. "See that thing on the roof of the trailer? Black, long, kind of shiny here and there, nailed to the top?"

The little of man peered down, perching the binoculars on his nose again. "Mm-hmm," he answered. "What is it?"

"Solar panel."

That caught everyone's attention. While Tifa rolled her eyes and muttered something about Cloud being a _geek,_ they were ushered away from the town's edge and then up several sets of stairs into the biggest house in the town. It belonged to the little old man – Bugenhagen was his name and he was one of the elders of Cosmo Canyon, one of its leaders.

"Solar electricity was such a momentary thing," the old man said, while handing both Cloud and Tifa very welcome glasses of iced lemonade. "I still regret not looking into it at the time. It was around maybe for five years if even that and suddenly… poof. All gone, and no matter how we tried, we couldn't find any to try and salvage it. What's more, we couldn't find much information about them either – and the people who made them?" he shook his head. "Vanished for the most part."

"How'd you manage the wind turbines?" Cloud asked. "Books about them aren't exactly thick on the ground either. Trust me, I looked."

"A lot of trial and error, but in the end the systems weren't that difficult to grasp. It's as easy as the wheel when you know the theory," the old man chuckled and sat down. "Nothing like solar panels though. We tried some concentrated solar thermal arrays a while back – basic steam engine with a boiler, nothing fancy – but we could never get proper yield out of it and it was too hard to make. But… yours isn't thermal, is it?"

"Photovoltaic," Cloud said – and if he was a bit _proud_ of it, well, he had every right to be. "It only produces 120 watts, though – nowhere near enough to power the truck. That's not the point of it, though."

"What is the point, then?" Bugenhagen asked interestedly.

"Point is, I can make more of them," Cloud said, grinning.

"That's why we came here," Tifa interjected. "We're from Nibelheim, and Nibelheim is very cloudy and gets very snowy in the winter – so it's not too good for this sort of stuff. Cosmo Canyon gets more sunlight."

"So you came here with the intention of researching solar energy here?" the old man mused.

"No," Cloud answered. "Well, yes, obviously. But mainly I intend to make solar panels, not just research them. Maybe even sell them."

"…Sell them," Bugenhagen repeated slowly.

"Not for a while yet, though. I need to manage production properly – right now it takes me too long to make a single panel. I need to smooth out the kinks in the process. And I still need to do some experiments with materials, to get better yield out of the finished panels," Cloud said. "And before I can do any of that, I need to build up a solid base of solar arrays to _power_ all the machinery I need. I'd need to cover every rooftop here with photovoltaics, just to start with."

The old man stared at him suspiciously. "That sounds very ambitious of you. Especially considering that there are powers out there that would prefer not to let solar technology see the light of day again."

Cloud smiled viciously. "Oh, I _know_."


	12. Chapter 12

It wasn't as easy as all that. Although Bugenhagen tentatively supported them and convinced the others to let them stay – he even offered his spare room for Tifa and Cloud until they could figure out some other place to stay – the majority of the town remained suspicious. As they should really – ShinRa it turned out hadn't put Cosmo Canyon completely off its radar.

"We've had some trouble along the years, but more so lately," Bugenhagen sighed. "Our philosophies and beliefs are intended to be peaceful – but as with anything, they can be taken to radical heights. And some did."

It turned out a _terrorist organisation_ had started in Cosmo Canyon. And not even to the benefit or because of the Canyon's people themselves – no it was mainly outsiders that had taken a look at the theories and beliefs Cosmo Canyon was rich in, and then they'd ran with those theories. And, with those theories in heart, had tried to face off against ShinRa.

"Idiots," Cloud pronounced the AVALANCE when he heard about them, their quest to destroy facilities and make general, noisy trouble for ShinRa.

"Like you're any better – that's precisely what you're trying to do too!" Tifa said.

"Yeah, but I'm not stupid enough to get up their faces about it, am I? ShinRa's going crush them, make an example out of them, and in the end people will just end up fearing ShinRa more, and even more unwilling to go against it," Cloud snorted.

"And your way is better?" Tifa asked, shaking her head.

"Isn't it?"

Revolution or rebellion were never words Cloud applied to himself or to his goals, but it was the framework Cosmo Canyon's people worked them into, when they learned of Cloud's plans. It took a couple days maybe, and a lot of people were extremely suspicious and dubious about the whole thing. Solar Technology was one of the things that had been _lost_ after all – and what was he, a teenager with a silly haircut, trying the impossible. Most thought it would never work, that he was trying to trick them somehow.

That ended when Cloud and Tifa started moving equipment from the flatnose to the town – the first of which was the solar panel, the converters and resistors and, of course, a couple of the 20 kWh batteries.

It's hard to be dubious about the viability of something, when you had proof in your hand. Most everyone in Cosmo Canyon had a battery of some sort to store the electricity they got from the wind turbines and enough electronic gadgetry to keep an eye on said turbines – so most of them had the equipment to test the solar panel themselves. So… Cloud took it apart, and handed out each and every individual solar cell in it. All sixty six of them.

"And you can… _print_ these?" Bugenhagen asked while he – and pretty much everyone – tested his transparency solar cell with a volt meter.

"Yeah," Cloud nodded. "The idea is to start printing them on glass, though. The plastic transparencies are too fragile, won't hold out against the elements."

"And then we'll make the glass look like stained glass paintings and sell them as art," Tifa agreed grinning.

"And other things," Cloud agreed. "First I need to get the production figured out. And before that… I need a power source."

"Which you will get by covering every roof in Cosmo Canyon in solar panels," Bugenhagen agreed, giving him a look and a sly smile. "Which, consequently, will give _us_ an extra power source, and endear you to quite a number of Cosmo Canyon's citizens."

"I hadn't even thought of that," Cloud answered, without even bothering to hide his smugness.

Even then there was some suspiciousness from the townsfolk. Even after they admitted that Cloud's technology was viable, that didn't make them any less worried about it – or about ShinRa's possible retaliation. ShinRa had done all in its power to bury solar technology and all other renewable energy sources after all. If they found out…

"We'll just have to make sure they _don't_." Cloud said. "That's the whole point in _disguising_ the tech. So that they _won't_ find out."

He had his supporters too, though. One of them offered a room in her house for him and Tifa to work with even, and that was where Cloud set up his printers and other equipment, turning a corner of the room into a laboratory where he could mix the chemicals for his so called inks. It took a couple of days to get everything going again with everyone in Cosmo Canyon pretty much breathing down his neck, but eventually… eventually he was in business.

"Now, let's look at your roofs and see what we can do," Cloud murmured.

Cosmo Canyon's buildings were mostly made of wood, and that included the majority of the rooftops. There were some metal plates there too, but mostly the roofs were made of shingles.

"Hmmm…" Cloud hummed while examining one of the shingles. He _could_ if push came to shove turn it into a solar cell. Coat it first in smooth material, lacquer of some sort, and then just print over it. It would, however, be grossly wasteful. "I don't suppose I can convince you of the benefits of felt roofs?" he asked Bugenhagen.

"Can you print on something as big as that?" the old man wondered.

"Easily. I've the printer heads mounted on arms, not in frames, so I can print on as big a surface as I like," Cloud shrugged. One of the benefits of having started in Nibelheim – there was a lot of old construction gadgetry around from the times of ShinRa's occupation of the town. Plus, there'd been many useful things at the mansion he'd happily taken apart.

"Hm. I think we have some felt in storage somewhere," Bugenhagen hummed.

The first photovoltaicly printed roof felt took Cloud about a week – and he had no shortage of helpers. Half of the town tried to pack into his workshop to watch and generally get in the way, and although Tifa tried to keep people politely out it didn't work quite as well as Cloud blowing up at them did.

And blow up he did. Magnificently.

He'd been trying really hard too, to keep it in – but a couple of weeks playing nice for the people of Cosmo Canyon, in trying to get into their good graces, wore on him. He was not a nice person, nor was he a people person – and having so many around him all the time, asking stupid questions and poking their damn fingers into everything… the last straw was when one of the bumbling idiots knocked over a phial and ruined a good two days of careful chemical mixing in one go.

"Now would be the good time to get the fuck out," he said. Or roared. One or the other.

Somehow he managed to fix the damage somewhat without actually throwing what remained at the walls – Tifa was there, holding onto the back of his neck the whole time and keeping him grounded, that probably helped. After that she dragged him out and to the open space in front of the town, where people tended to gather every night to watch the stars. And there, with pretty much the whole town of Cosmo Canyon watching, they kicked off their shoes and wrapped their knuckles in tape which both now carried with them pretty much all the time.

Then they fought.

It was brutal. It had been a while for them – they'd both tried to reign it in since Nibelheim, but they were both too used to their particular way of relieving tension. So, when they faced off there, on the dangerous ledge of Cosmo Canyon with the Valley of the Fallen Star spreading out before them, and the people of Cosmo Canyon watching, they showed no mercy. It was painful, it was glorious and it was _intensely_ satisfying.

Afterwards Cloud was bruised and wiping blood from his split lip, and he knew he'd feel the beating for weeks to come – but his hands had stopped shaking and he no longer felt like kicking people off cliffs, which was as good as it was going to get.

"I had wondered," Bugenhagen admitted. "With a string like that…"

No one in Cosmo Canyon mentioned the string – no one mentioned _anyone's_ stings. Most people in the town had slack grey strings and a couple had dark withered strings, the colour green just barely hinted in them. It was a place of recluses and outcasts and people who'd given up on the current _modern_ society. They understood. And that was part of the reason why they'd been so wary of Cloud. _Because_ they understood.

"It takes a very passionate hatred, for a string like that to form," Bugenhagen said. "And hatred like that doesn't just change a man. It _shapes_ them."

"He's dealing with it in his own way. He's actually much better now, than he was a couple years back," Tifa said, while Cloud stalked away.

And that was it. No one asked about the string, and no one asked about the fight. Cloud wasn't sure if he was grateful or bitter about it – his whole life he'd carried his string and his anger like a weight, and all his life he'd been constantly reminded of them. Not just by his own memories – _why would I, or anyone, want a soulmate like you_ – but by the people around him. It was weird that in Cosmo Canyon… that didn't happen.

People did change their behaviour towards him, though. Now that they knew his limits and at least one of his _many_ triggers and how he reacted when his fuse was blown, they learned to work around them. There was an intensely infuriating period when people were _cautious_ and _careful_ around him, which sent Cloud to another fight with Tifa. But after that… they learned how to deal with him.

He wasn't pushed, his work space wasn't invaded by hoards of people, and no one got into his personal bubble. People only talked to him about photovoltaic and renewable energy and electronics and nothing else. No personal matters, no issues and, thank almighty god, no _feelings_. Just facts and business and the future.

Cloud hadn't even realised how hard it had been to be and to breathe before, not before there, in that odd isolated bubble of _acceptance_ , he realised that it had simply… eased. He could stand up straighter, he could inhale deeper – he didn't have to protect himself, or defend himself, or justify himself. Because Cosmo Canyon didn't judge him for what he was. Just for what he _did_.

He had no illusions about what he was. He was a hateful, angry, _bitter_ person, and hard to deal with. He didn't do nice, he didn't do easy. And Cosmo Canyon didn't care – it understood.

"You've directed your passion to a good cause," Bugenhagen simply said and that was it.

They called his hatred and his anger a _passion_. That grated a bit, but… it was also somewhat easier, to think of it that way. It was still hatred and it was still ugly as hell, but passion made it sound a little less destructive.

"Okay?" Tifa asked, when she found him sitting on one of the ledges, just staring out at the valley.

"Yeah," Cloud said, looking down and at his left hand. His string was still ugly, hateful green, and still frayed, still worn and damaged. Somewhere inside him, his soul probably looked similar. And Cosmo Canyon _didn't mind_. He'd came to further his goals. He hadn't expected to… "I… I think I like this place."

She smiled and sat down beside him. "I do too," she admitted, lifting her left hand and eying her own string. It was pointing northward. "Vincent's gone back to Nibelheim," she commented. "Pretty much the moment we came here, he…"

Cloud sighed and then wrapped his right arm around her, crushing her against his side. "He's an asshole. I wish you could just ignore him."

"You don't know if he's an asshole. I don't know if he's an asshole. I don't know him at all," Tifa sighed, resting her head against his shoulder. "I left him a letter, you know. In the mansion. Telling him about myself and stuff…" she hesitated. "Do you think he'll read it?"

Cloud considered that for a moment. If he found a letter from Rufus, telling him about what Rufus was like, would he read it? "He'll read it," he said. "No doubt about it."

The next day they were officially accepted into the community of Cosmo Canyon – and introduced to two of the last few original inhabitants of the Canyon, the fire-cats Deneh and Nanaki.


	13. Chapter 13

Before Cloud realised it, months had passed. Where the first days and weeks in Cosmo Canyon had been tense and tentative and what little progress he had made had been carefully scrutinized by the people, the progress he made after he and Tifa had been officially included… they were worlds apart. Mainly because with inclusion came, well… _inclusion_.

There were a _lot_ of intellectual people in Cosmo Canyon, it turned out. The place simply attracted a certain sort of mindset and a certain sort of, well, IQ level. Of all the people who lived in Cosmo Canyon, about ninety five percent had _dedicated_ their lives to the planet and to _saving it_. Or if not that, then at least co-existing with it in harmonious ways. Meaning, they led their lives in green ways, striving towards renewable, sustainable lifestyles. And they'd achieved it too.

When Cloud and Tifa were included into the society of Cosmo Canyon, they found out just how complicated and rich it was. Wind turbines were literally just the tip of the ice berg. Cosmo Canyon recycled everything from food waste to what little house hold litter they made – which wasn't much – to actual waste. The waste treatment in the town was pretty advanced too, considering that they had very little electricity go around – they made do with organisms and chemical reactions carefully maintained by what turned out to be a whole _slew_ of chemists.

"Most of us aren't exactly university trained," elder Hargo, who was the head of the so called alchemists' guild of Cosmo Canyon, admitted. "Most of us started out as students who dropped out of schools, or hobbyists and amateurs who just had the interest and the inclination. But with trial and error… we've managed well enough."

The alchemists' guild produced not just clean drinking water for the town and took care of the waste products, but they also made the nutrients people used in their private greenhouses. And every house – each and every one of them – had a greenhouse. And not just any sort of greenhouses either – the only sustainable form of _farming_ in Cosmo Canyon was hydroponics.

"But doesn't that use a lot of water?" Tifa asked. "With water being so scarce here…"

"Actually, it's the opposite. You lose a lot of water to evaporation by using conventional methods, but with hydroponics you can control the amount of water and use as much as you need, no more or less. Plus, we don't have that much arable soil here."

What arable soil they did have they'd made themselves through the process of composting waste. Right now they were mainly storing it – the intention was to one day build a greenhouse where they could control the environment and thus use the soil to its full potential without the fear that the dry atmosphere of the Canyon would ruin it. Basically, they wanted to build a forest in a bubble, they just didn't have the means right then.

And how did they get their means? There was a whole _guild_ of people who made a certain type of living by venturing out of Cosmo Canyon and visiting any and all junkyards they could. They brought back everything useful – most of Cosmo Canyon electronics were actually salvaged from piles of junk, or put together from scraps and spare parts.

"We've gotten pretty much all of our building material that way," Shildra, who both ran the only Inn in Cosmo Canyon and also headed the builder's guild in the town, said. "Just tell them what you need and next time they head out they'll see if they can find it."

Cloud did just that, handing over a whole list of things that would've come in handy. "Right now what I need most is glass, these chemicals and any and all printer parts you can find. Inkjet printers preferably," he said.

"About that glass, actually," one of the Cosmo Canyon residents interjected. "I got a kiln. I've been meaning to try out glass blowing. What sort of glass do you need?"

It took off from there. Whenever there was a so called big project in Cosmo Canyon, most of the town tended to pitch in. Whether it was building a new house or taking down an old one, or putting up a couple more windmills, most people pitched in. Outside Shildra's Inn, the Starlet Pub and the Tiger Lily weapon shop, there wasn't much use for money in Cosmo Canyon. Most _trade_ in town was actual trade, usually favour for favour or favour for benefit.

So, the people of Cosmo Canyon helped Cloud's business of making solar panels get off the ground and he made them solar panels, free of charge. Never mind the fact that he fully intended to cover the town in solar panels whether they helped or not.

"Is it always like this here?" Cloud asked Nanaki, who'd grown increasingly interested in his work and now spent most of his time at Cloud's workshop, watching the teen work.

"That is how Cosmo Canyon is," the fire-cat answered, flicking his tail. "That is the only way a place like this can exist. Through teamwork."

Cloud's and Tifa's house was built through teamwork too. After Cloud had started spreading out his solar panels over the rooftops – rooftop felt covered in plastic sheets, not perfect but cheap, serviceable and easy enough to repair and replace when the time came – the town decided to throw their means together and build them a house. Cloud had a heavy hand in designing it though – and it actually took longer because of that.

"Well, it's my house. What did you expect?" he asked, when the people who had been all worked up about getting another house built had to put on the breaks because Cloud… wanted to make the entire thing out of photovoltaics. That was the main reason why his work suddenly went from a one man operation, to a thirty man operation. Or, more specifically, an eleven men and eighteen women and one male fire-cat operation.

Hargo and his alchemists pretty much _stole_ his chemistry equipment and began producing the materials for him in their own private laboratories. Shildra and her people started designing the wall materials, working together with Henry the now increasingly skilled glass blower. Bugenhagen and Nanaki helped out too, with Deneh watching from the side interestedly but keeping her distance.

She didn't like Cloud much – probably because of the string. She, unlike Nanaki, was aware what a violently green string meant.

"Well, you certainly riled them all up," Tifa chuckled.

"I didn't mean to. I just wanted to make the floor tiles and have a large sunroof and painted windows and… so on," Cloud waved a hand.

"Well, it will be an experiment if nothing else," she mused.

Tifa had found her place in the community too – she was part of the unofficial security force, the martial arts guild. She was actually among the best trained martial artists in Cosmo Canyon, and was now teaching the others some of her moves. It was somewhat worrying to realise, but after Tifa, Cloud was the second best human fighter in Cosmo Canyon, and he had barely any muscle mass to speak of.

Nanaki kicked his ass, though, and Deneh could beat all three of them without trying, but the fire-cats didn't exactly use _martial arts_ so Cloud didn't count them.

Half a year after Tifa and Cloud had moved into Cosmo Canyon, the building of their house began. It was built technically _behind_ the main town, behind the cliff-top on the mountain. The majority of the Cosmo Canyon people preferred the shadow of the Clifftop where the observatory was built – it was naturally cooler there – but Cloud wanted his house to get as much sun as possible, obviously. So, the previously open space was opened up for the construction, and it began with pretty much every man, woman, and child pitching in.

It was a tricky balancing of electronics, construction and aesthetics. Cloud still intended to hide the solar tech under the guise of art, and that had to be observed in the construction of the house too – so… it was an experiment in electrical art architecture. One the town seemed to enjoy immensely.

"Well, you can't exactly blame us, can you?" Bugenhagen asked. "You might have less than honourable goals in mind, but this is what _we live for_. Sustainable, renewable lives in close contact with the earth. All of it is embodied in your house, everything from the material to the design. And your house is just going to be the prototype. If it works…"

If it worked, there would be a whole lot more houses of similar design to follow – and more. If it worked.

It took another six months to make it work – and it was not without its problems. Things broke or got lost, materials they needed couldn't be found, things they had to build took more time than they thought, and so on. It was a test of patience with had Cloud snapping almost daily – and which led to a whole new fighting ring being built just for him and Tifa, not far from the foundations of their hopefully soon to be house. They made use of the ring _a lot_.

And eventually, they weren't the only ones. Lots of Cloud's workers were also Tifa's students on and off. And somehow, god only knew how, hand to hand combat became not just an accepted way of relieving tension, but a daily exercise not just for Cloud's workers, but also those people otherwise taking part in the construction. It became a _thing_ , a popular, one could even call it _trendy,_ thing in Cosmo Canyon, to kick off one's shoes and go at it for a moment or two.

Tifa was the only one who ever fought against Cloud, though. Even after the first few attempts, even Nanaki decided not to risk it. Cloud fought too seriously – he fought with the intention to _hurt_ , and she was the only one who could not just take it but return the favour with equal fervour. One day, though, the worker muttered, one day they'd take him on too.

But eventually, after a lot of failures and detours and stalls, the house was built.

It looked a bit like an art installation. It was only one floor, with five rooms in total – three bedrooms, kitchen combined with living room, and a bathroom. How it was made was the important thing, though. Firstly, the roof was almost entirely made of photovoltaic glass – it was a prototype of the glass solar panels, so the design was simplistic, just a bunch of squares really. But beneath the roof, the floor followed suit – ceramic tiles, each and every one of them photovoltaic. Then the walls of recycled wood, brick and metal with photovoltaic panels and tiles. The windows were all solar panels too, of course. And in the front, serving as the porch of the fairly small house, was the first photovoltaic sunroof of the town – which with a few more glass walls Tifa intended to turn into their personal green house.

It was all done in hues of green – mainly because Tifa missed the forests and greenery of Nibelheim and it simply _seemed_ and felt cooler – and yellow because, well. _Solar_. The electronics were hidden in artistically sculpted pillars and pipes twisted into twists and curls. Henry the glassblower had even made glass leaves and flowers, adding them to the pipes holding the wiring, to make them look like works of art rather than what they really were.

It wasn't perfect. It was small, and due to the need to keep every photovoltaic surface clear, they couldn't put down carpets – which meant that during night-times the floor was absolutely _freezing_. The electronics took several months of tinkering to get working properly – and when something broke it was pretty hard to fix, with every panel and tile and glass frame so tightly secured. A lot of it, when it broke, couldn't be fixed at all.

"Well, we'll know better for the next project," Cloud mused out loud to his team of solar enthusiasts as they examined the house. "First and foremost, everything needs to be removable and replaceable. No more mortar."

"Also we need stronger glass," Ieza, one of his workers who worked with the electronics, manned the printers and had been part of Shildra's crew during the installation. "The normal glass is too brittle. We need much, _much_ harder stuff in the long run. Especially if we really will make stained glass paintings out of the stuff."

"The floor tiles worked pretty well, but they're fragile too," Nanaki, who had worked with Henry in making them, commented. "Pretty much everything here can be broken with a sharp knock. Besides, one day we want to pave roads, right? Normal ceramics won't be nearly enough for that."

"Hm," Cloud agreed. "So before we continue we need a way to make harder glass, harder ceramics and a new framework for everything. Anything else? Then we'll work on it tomorrow. Now get the hell out of my house."

 Tifa chuckled, watching Cloud chase his new not quite but almost employees away from their tiny new home. "It came out pretty nice," she commented.

Cloud just sighed, trying not to think about all the broken solar cells and panels or the wiring that had been destroyed during the building process. Prototypes were prototypes. "Next I want to build a workshop for the team," he said thoughtfully – because he had a _team_ now. The idea was that eventually every member of his team could work from home, from their own workshops and laboratories and kilns and whatever. Lots of them already were. But they still needed a main work space – somewhere where they could put together the final results. The actual solar panels.

"I'm doing this, Tifa," he said, as she sat beside him on the bench donated to them by Bugenhagen as a housewarming present. "I'm actually doing this. This… this is working."

"Mm-hmm," she agreed, hand on his shoulder. "It sure is. Now, more importantly – what are you going to call it? It's not quite a company yet, but it is still… well, a company of people."

And so, the Children of the Sun was born.


	14. Chapter 14

For all that Cloud was furiously concentrated on defeating ShinRa, he didn't actually pay all that much attention to the company and what happened to it. Even before Cosmo Canyon, that got news sparsely and always late, he'd barely even acknowledged the news, ShinRa related or otherwise. The only thing he'd actually noticed was the ending of the Wutai war somewhere in there – ShinRa's victory, of course.

He didn't really pay attention to the deaths of numerous scientists – _assassinations_ – that had been happening over the years. ShinRa's Science Department was generally involved with genetics and biological applications of Mako and thus they meant nothing to Cloud – his opponent was the technological side of ShinRa, a small part of them. The _mako reactors_. Them, and Rufus, were the only thing he really cared about. And since nothing much happened to those and Rufus, for all that he was an extremely public figure, he never appeared in the papers, Cloud didn't care one way or the other.

Not until the Nibelheim Reactor was sabotaged and it was linked in with the deaths of the scientists.

"Daddy says it started smoking yesterday evening," Tifa, who was the first one in Cosmo Canyon to know, said. "And it exploded just a little after that. It just… it just went up. The people evacuated in time, though, and no one died, but…"

"Huh," Cloud said. Of all the things he'd thought about, all the things he'd planned for – all the eventualities he'd been thinking of and preparing for… a _reactor blowing up_ wasn't one of them. "It… blew up? The Nibelheim Reactor blew up."

"Yeah," she said, smiling feebly. "Nibelheim's without power now. Well… the whole region is without power, all the way up to Rocket Town."

Cloud blinked. "Huh," he said again.

The Canyon's scavenging team headed out that day just to get the news. Tifa was at first their main source of information, but as power shut off in Nibelheim it eventually took with it the phone lines, and so the mayor of Nibelheim couldn't call his daughter anymore. So, it was the scavenging team which cleared up the whole picture.

"How long has this been going on?" Cloud asked with wonder, while the newspapers were shared out between the Cosmo Canyon residents – and with them, more information concerning the explosion. It was the papers that called the explosion the work of sabotage and linked it with the assassinations – they even listed the dead scientists in the paper, over twenty of them in total.

"For years," Tifa snorted. "I'm not surprised you didn't notice – you were holed-up in your mom's garage when it started."

"Hmh," Cloud answered, looking down at the paper. Apparently all the scientists died exactly the same way - sniped at a distance with a high calibre rifle. Many people were suspected, dozens had been incarcerated – including a number of ShinRa's scientists who they'd probably thought were trying to make their way up the corporate latter by unconventional means – but no one had any proof one way or the other. The only thing they knew for sure was that it was a sniper, and that the bullets used were all custom made.

"I don't see how it's connected to the Nibelheim Reactor," Cloud murmured.

"Cloud," Tifa said, giving him a look. "There was lot of scientific material in that reactor. You know. You read the files at the mansion."

"…Oh. Right," he muttered, thinking back to the mansion files. The Makonoid experiments had been held in Nibelheim – them and Jenova. He'd forgotten all about them. "Hm. Looks like they suspect AVALANCE now that there's been a bombing," he muttered. "Seems like their style."

Tifa made a noncommittal noise and looked down at her hand. Cloud looked down too and then shared a look with her. Vincent hadn't been moving much at all for the last year or so – the string had been pointing almost directly at Nibelheim.

"You think…?" Cloud asked.

Tifa just sighed and lifted her hand, resting her forehead against the curl of her pinky, just where the grey string wrapped around it. "Professor Hojo was one of the scientists sniped. Happened about a year ago," she said quietly. "I didn't pay attention to it before that, really. Professor Hojo was the one who… well."

"Ah," Cloud said, and they didn't speak of it again.

The destruction of the reactor interested Cloud much more than the deaths of the scientists and Vincent's probable involvement there in. The reactor on Mt. Nibel was the main power source for the majority of the western side of the Western Continent. The Nibel area _and_ Rocket Town area both drew power from Mt. Nibel. Or, they had. Would ShinRa try to route power from Corel now, or… would they start building new reactors in the west?

It was the _perfect_ time to try and push solar out there. People would be running out of power soon, they'd be looking for other sources. Except…

ShinRa didn't do _weak_. Whenever some sector of theirs weakened, they didn't leave it weak – they overcompensated. The destruction of Nibel's reactor would mean more ShinRa people in the west, not less. Turks and scientists and military personnel were probably already crawling all over Nibelheim, trying to find the people responsible. Try and push out now, and someone was sure to notice. Worse yet… Cloud didn't have anything to actually _sell_ yet.

Or, more specifically, he didn't have anything concrete _enough_. Yes, he could make solar panels now – they were starting on the building of a second solar powered house in Cosmo Canyon now, but in the meanwhile they were also making the first stained glass panels. But making use of those panels took effort. It took resistors, it took batteries and it took converters. It was easy in Cosmo Canyon where everyone already that those things. But elsewhere? People were far too used to the ease of just plugging their appliances into outlets and simply having them work.

If he tried to sell solar panels, he would also have to sell the necessary equipment, from the panels to the converters, for people actually to use them. And he just didn't have those things yet. He wasn't _ready_.

"Fuck this," he grumbled. If Nibelheim Reactor could've waited another year or two… but no. He couldn't make use of this. Except…

"I don't suppose there's a way to _quietly_ get the word out that Cosmo Canyon has a way to generate electricity without mako reactors needed, and without the risk of explosions?" he mused to Nanaki.

"I guess it would be possible. Why?" the fire-cat asked curiously.

Cloud looked over the expanse of rocky mountain. There was about seven hundred hectares of space on the mountain top where Cosmo Canyon town was, and where Cloud's home was built. It was where the first solar city would be built, Cloud knew that – it was already starting to be built, they were already _planning_ it. They had the streets marked, the house lots chosen – they even knew where the central square would be, and where the greenhouses would be built.

True, it was a thought exercise for most of Cosmo Canyon, a mere flight of fancy, a nice dream. Cloud was damn sure it would become reality, though. He was going to _fucking_ make it into reality because what made ShinRa powerful wasn't really mako or their armies or anything like that. It was the people supporting it. Those millions that lived in Midgar, who paid their bills and their taxes and happily gave away their freedoms for ShinRa's power and protection.

For the solar city of Cosmo Canyon to become reality it needed people. Cloud had thirty people working for him – but to make the city, he needed _thousands_. It didn't matter if they knew anything about solar engineering or architecture. If they would be willing to be taught… With the Nibel Reactor gone and thus power out for a good third of the continent, there would be a lot of people out there who might be willing to move. Lots of people would be leaving Nibelheim soon, probably, moving east, to Corel and to the Gongaga region, where there was still power easily available. Maybe…

"No, never mind," Cloud said. "I'm getting way ahead of myself."

The problem – the biggest problem – Cosmo Canyon had wasn't the lack of energy or the lack of materials or even the lack of people. It was lack of water and lack of food. Even with every household growing whatever vegetables they could, Cosmo Canyon imported food goods to survive. Bring a thousand people in, and those thousand people would just starve to death – and the majority of Cosmo Canyon's current population would go with them.

The destruction of the Nibel Reactor was a window of opportunity he simply couldn't make use of.

So while the world outside the canyon recoiled and shifted, Cloud gritted his teeth in frustration and went back to work. It was time to start putting together systems. Panel, resistor, battery, converter, all needed to be put together somehow so that he could finally start getting his tech actually _out_ there. Because the next time ShinRa presented him with an opportunity like this, he had to be ready for it.

Four days after the Nibelheim Reactor blew, they got a visitor. First seen only as a distant glimmer in the north, it quickly crossed over the expanse of the canyon area until it finally hovered over the space observatory on the cliff-top – the most advanced airship ever built. The airship Highwind, which carried with it not just a lot of people but also numerous empty barrels.

"We're on our way to Gongaga to pick up fuel," the captain said, after swinging down to talk with the elders in Cosmo Canyon. Cid Highwind was a windswept, oil stained man and, judging by the looks of his face, about at the end of his rope. "We've got enough generators in Rocket Town to get the lights back on, some of the machinery working, shit like that. But fuck it, we're in about as deep shit as Nibelheim when it comes to power. How's things here? We can still fit a few more barrels on board, so if you need some fuel here…"

"We've never had mako power here, so the reactor's destruction doesn't hurt us," Bugenhagen said while Cloud not so surreptitiously hung back, watching the airship with interest. "And we have our own power sources, none of which use mako or any of its derivates."

"You're fucking lucky," Cid said with a snort, eying the windmills. "Could use a couple of those in Rocket Town right about now too, but fuck if we have the time to start setting any up. And with ShinRa assholes crawling all over the place…"

"But you _would_ if you could?" Cloud asked, inching closer.

Cid gave him a look, glancing up to Cloud's hair, and snorting again. "I think right now every person in the fucking region would," he said. "Granted it would take a shit ton of them to power Rocket Town – we're no small town, and we have a lot of factories. Factories take a lot of power."

"Mm-hm," Cloud agreed. "And with factories and such you'd have the know-how to wire everything in too," he said slowly. "Give you a power source – a windmill or anything – and you'd be able to not just set it up, but make use of it. No need for us to supply you with batteries or converters or anything."

Cid narrowed his eyes. "The fuck are you?"

"Cloud is the new head of our engineering guild," Bugenhagen said, motioning Cloud to step forward. "And currently in charge of most of our energy production and all of our energy projects here in Cosmo Canyon."

"Ain't he a bit too young for that?"

The _head of engineering guild_ was all news to Cloud, but whatever. That wasn't important. "You work for ShinRa?" Cloud asked, looking at Cid.

"I work _with_ it," Cid said with a sneer. "They finance and overseer a lot of my projects. And they supply all the power – or they _did_ anyway."

"Hmm," Cloud answered, watching the man's expression closely. "You sound absolutely _thrilled_ about it."

"Yeah, fucking ecstatic. What's it to you?"

Cloud shared glances with Bugenhagen, who made an _it's your choice_ sort of gesture. Cloud turned to Cid and then looked up at the Highwind. "Any ShinRa personnel on board?" he asked.

"Some," Cid grumbled, glancing up as well. "Why?"

"Well… one day when there isn't come talk to me," Cloud said. "I might have… alternatives for you."

Cid eyed him and then looked between Cloud and Bugenhagen, apparently sensing something more going on. "I might," he said then. "Right now though I don't have the damn time for fucking mysteries," he said. "Do you folks need anything from outside? We'll be coming this way on our way back, so if you want anything from Gongaga, this would be the perfect moment to say something."

Bugenhagen organised a couple people from Cosmo Canyon to go with the Highwind, to do a bit of trading with Gongaga for food – mostly dry goods and such. Cid helped the people climb on board, giving Bugenhagen their flight schedule and ETA. Then he paused.

"One more thing," he said. "I got a… stowaway to drop here. Hope you don't mind."

Before either Cloud or the Cosmo Canyon elders could think to say anything, Cid Highwind climbed the ladder back to the airship hovering overhead. The ladder was pulled up and the Highwind made to turn and for a moment they all thought the ship's captain had been making a joke of some sort.

Then a hatch in the bottom of the ship opened and a blur of red dropped down, spun in the air and then landed with a resounding thump in front of them. It straightened up as if it _hadn't_ just dropped down about thirty stories worth of space, and then stared at Cloud – and then over him at Tifa standing a little further away. Cloud cursed not too quietly when he recognized the man.

It was Vincent Valentine.


	15. Chapter 15

 

The only reason Cloud didn't rush at Vincent and beat him to the ground was because the moment he took the first step forward, Tifa had him by the arms. That didn't stop him making his extreme displeasure at the sight of the man known, however. "You son of a bitch!" Cloud started. "You bastard, you fucking –"

"Cloud!" Tifa snapped.

"No, I'm going to kick his fucking ass for what he put you --!"

"Cloud!" she snapped again. "That is not your choice to make so shut up!"

While Vincent scowled at them and just stood there like an idiot, Bugenhagen looked between the furiously struggling Cloud, Tifa who was steadily staring at Vincent, and Vincent who said or did nothing. The Cosmo Canyon elder cleared his throat. "Cloud, Tifa. You know this man?"

"Yeah, we fucking know –" Cloud started and stopped, with Tifa's hand gripping over his mouth tight enough to bruise.

"We know him," Tifa said and when Cloud made to elbow her on the side, she twisted him and put him in a brutally efficient headlock. "Cloud, if you don't calm down, I'm going to knock you out," she said as calmly as she could. "Stop making a scene!" then, quieter, she added. "He's _not_ your soulmate. He's _mine_. So calm the _fuck_ down."

It was hard, borderline impossible. Tifa was the one person Cloud could maybe say that he loved. And for all that Vincent hadn't gone out his way to hurt Tifa, he still had, she'd still been hurt and for all that she was brave and bright and put up a cheerful front, she'd been hurting quietly for _years_. And she was so damn nice too, too nice to really let her feelings show the way she had all the right to, the way she deserved to.

But he calmed down and stopped struggling. When she eased the choke hold a bit, he stayed still and just glared cold, furious _murder_ at Vincent. But he did nothing. She was right – it wasn't his place, nor was it his choice.

And at least Vincent wasn't running away this time.

Tifa waited for a moment in that tense, furious silence and then finally released Cloud completely. When she was sure he wasn't about to fly off the handle again, she turned fully towards her soulmate. "Vincent," she said simply.

The man frowned and for a moment it seemed like he was fully intending to keep his peace and say nothing. When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet and low, almost inaudible. "Tifa," he said.

It took only one step to make the string snap into place and into full visibility between them – Tifa was the one to make the step, holding out her left hand almost as if to calm Vincent, like one would try to calm a nervous animal. Vincent didn't move even as the string appeared and the people around them gasped. The string was, after all, fully grey on both sides. Not hopeful red or hateful green or any other colour it could turn to – but a dead grey. If there was any hope in it, or any hate, it was impossible to tell one way or the other.

But it was taunt and somehow still alive, connecting Tifa inexorably to Vincent, and that was enough. The people were very quickly clearing away from around them, some of them out right running – even Bugenhagen was backing away, though with many curious glances cast towards Tifa. Cloud didn't move though because, fuck it, Tifa was his best friend, no way was he leaving her now, no matter how fucking private it was supposed to be.

"Are you going to run away again?" Tifa asked, her hand still held out, warding and soothing all at once.

Vincent hesitated and then glanced at Cloud. He looked like he wanted to say something – maybe tell Cloud to go away – but the glare Cloud aimed at him seemed to make the futility of such request known. Instead the man shook his head. "I'm… here to stay. If you'll…" he trailed away and looked down, at the string. He lifted his own hand, the gold talon one, and looked at it, where the grey string vanished into the metal.

"If you think you can just walk in and become part of my life, just like that," Tifa said quietly. "I gotta tell you. It's not so easy."

"No, it isn't," Vincent agreed and lowered his hands. "You… read the files at the mansion?"

"We both did," Tifa said, motioning at Cloud with her right hand, and Cloud automatically stepped closer, glaring but silent.

Vincent eyed them. "You two are…"

"Friends," Tifa said almost coolly.

The red cloaked man considered that and nodded. "Then there are some things I need to tell you… both," he said. "About what happened then, and… what I've been doing for the last years, and why."

Tifa blinked and then tore her eyes away from Vincent, looking at Cloud instead.

"Our house is as secure as it gets around here," Cloud grimaced. "Come on."

Vincent followed them like a particularly colourful and awkward shadow as Cloud and Tifa led him to their cheerful yellow and green house. The man blinked at the walls and the floor and the ceiling, looking bewildered by the _brightness_ of it all. Cloud was still itching to punch his lights out, so he busied his hands in digging some ice out of their little freezer, and fixing all three of them cool drinks.

"So?" Tifa asked, sitting down on one of the three chairs by their little round kitchen table.

Vincent hesitated and sat down across from her – Cloud taking the third seat at Tifa's right side. "You read all the files?" the man asked.

"Hm," Tifa nodded.

"Then you know that I…"

"Were killed in action and brought back to life, experimented on and turned into…" Tifa trailed away, motioning at the man, and Vincent looked rather like he would've liked to wince.

"Yes. Except I wasn't killed in action. I was killed by Professor Hojo," the man said and with that the floodgates opened and he told them everything.

Of course they'd known that it wasn't pretty, what had happened to Vincent – it had been right there, in those files. But what the files hadn't told was why. Vincent had objected one of the experiments – he'd gotten in the way of the head scientist in charge of the project, Hojo. And he'd been killed for it, shot at point blank range. And then he'd been experimented on, in turn by Hojo and by Professor Lucrecia Crescent.

"Lucrecia had a grey string, and I, of course, had none at the time," Vincent said, staring at the glass of lemon juice he hadn't even touched yet. "I loved her. She thought it was a taboo. It… doesn't matter."

Lucrecia Crescent had married Professor Hojo and then gotten pregnant. It was that pregnancy, and the experimentation on the child, that Vincent had objected to – the experiment that had eventually produced First Class SOLDIER Sephiroth. Vincent had died in the attempt to stop it. All of that had happened a couple years before Cloud and Tifa had even been _born_. The experiments started and ended and in the end Vincent was left in a coffin to rot and die. Except, he hadn't quite died.

Instead he'd been woken up eleven years later by Tifa.

"Why did you leave?" Tifa asked quietly. "Why did you just… we could've –"

"I couldn't," Vincent said, scowling. "You were a _child_ and I was… confused and scared and…" he trailed away and took a breath. "I had to know first, I had to figure out what happened."

"And that took you over seven years?" Cloud asked cuttingly.

"No," Vincent admitted. "Just a year or two. But… correcting some of the past mistakes, that took longer."

There was a moment of silence before Tifa let out a breath and leaned back. "So, I was right. You're the assassin who's been killing ShinRa scientists. And you blew up the Mt. Nibel Reactor," she said.

"I did," Vincent said, closing his eyes. "And trust me, the world will be a better place without them."

Cloud blinked at that and then looked between Vincent and Tifa, and at the string between them, still grey and never changing. "Huh," he said.

He wasn't sure how he knew it but… he couldn't help but think that Vincent hadn't done it as much to repent for past or correct mistakes as he had done it all for _Tifa_. To make a better world for _her_. It was utterly ridiculous to even think it, but he was absolutely certain he was right.

"You've been awake before," Cloud said slowly. "Even before Tifa and I woke you up. On and off, I bet, you've woken up. And then you probably just went back to sleep in that coffin."

 _That_ made Vincent wince. "Yes," he admitted.

"You could've left that place any time. You could've gone and done… whatever, at any time. But you didn't," Cloud said.

"No," Vincent agreed, wincing again.

"Unbelievable," Cloud muttered, shaking his head.

Tifa blinked and then looked at Vincent – who now, for the first time, refused to look at her. "Vincent?" she asked quietly.

"I had to," the man said. "There _hasn't_ been anything good in my life for over a decade. Nothing… unstained, nothing pure. There was no reason before. The world was rotten, I was… satisfied to rot away with it. But then there you were. And I couldn't… I _had_ to fix it."

"I'm going to throw up," Cloud said and stumbled to his feet and out of the kitchen, out to the green house that made the front of their house. There he sat for a long while in sort of hazy, nauseous stupor.

It was messed up; all of it was messed up. And it wasn't good. Vincent was _messed_ _up_ to the core and his logic was naïve and stupid and ruthless all at once – and it would come to bite them all in the ass later, if ShinRa ever found out who'd been the one behind it all, and where that one was. And now it was all piled on _Tifa_ who didn't deserve that sort of responsibility, regardless of the fact that it hadn't been hers; that it never should've been hers.

But the worse of it all was that… whatever he'd done aside, Vincent's motives were good. His intentions were good. He'd done it for _Tifa_.

Cloud still wanted to punch him. And throw him off a cliff and leave him to die, and a number of other things. He wanted to shake the man and ask him what the hell he'd been _thinking_. But more than that…

Tifa stumbled out a little after he had and hovered over him. "Cloud," she said in quiet, shaking voice. "I really need to beat something up right now."

Cloud laughed a weird, choked laugh at that and got up. "Yeah. Yeah," he said, blindly grabbing for her hand. "Come on."

Together they headed to the fighting ring, kicking of their shoes as they went. Then, barely stopping to wrap up their knuckles, they launched into furious motion, fists flying without restraint, feet kicking up. As they fought, some of the Cosmo Canyon residents – mainly Cloud's workers – trickled in to watch, as they usually did these days whenever people fought. That didn't matter though, nor did the fact that Vincent hesitantly came out as well, a solitary red and black figure among the Cosmo Canyon residents, most of whom wore lighter shades.

Tifa hit Cloud in the cheek and Cloud nailed her on the solar plexus with his foot, she caught him by the leg and threw him on the ground and very nearly crushed him under her knees. He twisted around and kicked her feet from under her before launching at her without pause. She threw him again and he grabbed her hand, locking her for a moment before she twisted away and made to hit him, he blocked and felt the impact resonate through his whole arm. For a moment, they traded punches and kicks, blocks and parries, and Cloud knew his arms and shins would be bruised black and blue tomorrow. It didn't matter.

Tifa beat him in the end, kicking him under the chin, making lights flash beneath Cloud's eyes and very nearly knocking him unconscious. By that time they were both sweaty, breathless and exhausted, and the furious, desperate fire that Cloud knew so well had died in her eyes. So he dared to cry uncle, and together they collapsed in the ring while the spectators cheered.

Vincent looked mildly disturbed, Cloud thought when he caught the sight of the man from the corner of his eye.

 _Good_.


	16. Chapter 16

Cloud was in Henry's workshop, hiding without any shame when the Highwind returned from Gongaga.

Their usually fairly peaceful house had become ground zero for the emotional tension incendiary device known as Tifa and Vincent. The two of them couldn't seem to decide whether they wanted to _talk things through_ which they did aplenty, or if they wanted to have nothing to do with each other in which too they indulged aplenty. It was like being stuck between two spinning magnets who weren't sure which way to turn, and whether to repel each other or snap into place. Either way, after just a day of it Cloud was utterly sick of both of them and wanted nothing to do with the whole thing.

So he was hiding away at the former ceramic kiln, current miniature glass factory, soldering some solar panels. Henry's workshop was pretty much the only place in Cosmo Canyon where you could safely do stuff like that, seeing that it was made keeping in mind potential of fires and such breaking out. Of course soldering wasn't that dangerous when you knew how to do it right, but one was still working with high heat and in a small town made mostly of wood…

Cloud had a bad feeling the place was going to end up being his sanctuary for the following days. People were _unbearably_ curious about Vincent and Tifa and wanted to in this very annoying side-along way ask about how they were doing and if Tifa was okay. Well. Cosmo Canyon people didn't ask and they didn't gossip – but they were interested and oh so concerned. And it turned out most of them though Cloud and Tifa had been sleeping with each other since their arrival which was just fucking brilliant.

"If it's about Tifa then you can shove it up your ass and get the hell out," he said without looking up when door to the workshop opened. "I don't give a shit."

"No, Master Strife, it ain't that. There's people coming – Elder Bugenhagen sent me!" a girl, one of the few children of the town, gasped while clutching her side. "He says they're Turks! And they're looking for you!"

Cloud's head snapped up. "Turks?" he asked, glancing back.

"Yeah. Couple of them – they came with the Highwind. Asked to see you," the girl said. "Elder Bugenhagen's gonna bring 'em, but he wanted me to warn you."

Cloud blinked and then got up quickly. "Get those lids, quick – and that carpet," he said, motioning, while quickly taking all the electronic bits and bobs flung about the work table, and beginning to shove them into boxes. "Cover that box – that too. Bring me that lid."

The girl ran about fetching things for him as he hurriedly hid all damning evidence of electronics in the workshop. It was where they put all the solar panels together, so there was a lot of stuff about that wasn't strictly speaking necessary for a kiln or a forge or whatever you could call the workshop. Testing equipment, electronic wiring, resistors, converters, batteries, and so on and so on.

Cloud looked around. It was about as good as it was going to get at such short notice. "Now get the hell out," he said to the kid, who slumped a bit with disappointment. Cloud grimaced, glancing at her – knowing fully well that she was hoping to get into his _guild_ when she got old enough, never mind the fact that Cloud had no intention of actually leading a guild. He didn't care about the management of people's day to day electronics, just the solar tech. The only thing he'd lead was his company of rag tag engineers, and that was it.

Still… if she was going to work for him one day. "Good job," he said through gritted teeth, making her perk up. "Now go tell Tifa."

She still didn't look happy about it, but she didn't look heartbroken. "Whatever," Cloud said after her and then sat back down by the work table, where the solar panel he'd been soldering was still spread out, along with the soldering equipment.

That, though, he didn't need to hide.

"Turks," he muttered and ran both hands over the stubble at the sides of his mohawk. Then he picked up the soldering iron and forced himself back to work. It had been inevitable, of course, that Turks would come for him eventually. But were they here because of… of Rufus, or because of the Children of the Sun?

There was no time to wonder about it – just a couple minutes later, there was a knock on the door. Cloud took a breath. "Yeah, what?"

"Cloud? It's Bugenhagen – there's some people here to see you," the Elder said, as if he wasn't perfectly aware that Cloud already knew. "Are you busy?"

"Yeah, take a rain check," Cloud snorted, and then cursed as his hand slipped and the copper wire he'd been soldering in melted not at the seam but a tiny bit over the glass. "Son of a –"

The door opened while Cloud reached for the sponge to try and clean the bubble of melted metal off the glass. Bugenhagen and two men in suits – one of whom Cloud immediately recognized thanks to the power of first meetings. The man was older, his hair had more grey in it, his face more lines, and there was a new level of exhaustion in his eyes. But it was the same damn Turk that had been with Rufus – the same damn Turk that had carried all the paper work. _Veld_ , Cloud could still hear Rufus say somewhere in the back of his head, almost nine years ago. _Is he stupid too?_

"Well, you people are certainly dressed for the weather," Cloud said, glancing up and down along the dark, trademark suits, and then turned his back to them to hide his grimace. He picked up the iron and the wire again, and turned his attention to the glass. "What can I do for you, _gentle_ men?"

"Cloud Strife?" Veld asked and Cloud made a noncommittal noise. "I am not certain if you remember me, but we met once approximately eight years ago."

"Yeah, I remember," Cloud answered, thinking wildly. With that opening, was this about Rufus? Or had they send Veld to deal with that pesky solar engineer because Veld's prior knowledge about him? "What do you want?" Cloud asked, not looking away from the panel.

Veld didn't answer for a moment. "Could you excuse us for a moment?" he then asked.

"Cloud?" Bugenhagen asked.

"Its fine," Cloud said, though it wasn't, it so _very much_ wasn't. Still he waved a dismissal hands and imagined in his head sticking the soldering iron in Veld's eye socket. That helped.

Bugenhagen left somewhat reluctantly and Veld cleared his throat while the other Turk, a younger, long haired man of Wutai descent, stepped outside to guard the door. "I imagine you have questions," Veld said.

"I don't," Cloud answered, lifting the iron from the seam and watching the trail of smoke evaporate. The seam was coming out utterly ragged, nothing like the smooth, clean seams he usually managed. Shit. If he was going to ruin the panel because of some damn _Turks_ … "Nothing outside _what do you want,_ " he added.

Veld said nothing for a moment and Cloud's skin _crawled_ as the man stepped closer, to see what he was doing. "Hm," the man said. "Very nice."

Cloud tsked. The solar panel he was working on was the first experiment in actual pictographical style of glass solar panels. Instead of perfectly square or rectangle cells, the cells were in varying shapes, triangles, pentagons, hexagons, rhombuses and so on. Figuring out how to lay out the soldered wiring on them to still keep the cells _viable_ was a pain in the ass, but it had to be done. Otherwise they'd never be able move on from grid patterns to something more complex.

The idea was to one day have panels with _curving_ shapes, after all. And actual _pictures_. That was the whole point of stained glass – that it looked like something. Something that, consequently, would not look like a _solar panel_.

Cloud slowly set the soldering iron aside, turning to Veld. "What do you want?" he asked again.

Veld frowned at him. "We noticed you had moved from Nibelheim," he said slowly. "Master Rufus wished to know the reason."

"Did he?" Cloud asked flatly. "How fucking nice of him."

That didn't seem like what Veld had been expecting to hear and he looked almost taken aback for a moment. Cloud stared at him through the revelation, watching the emotions flitter over the man's borderline unreadable face. Surprise, dismay, realisation, regret… it was probably something like that anyway.

"Well. We wanted to know the reason," Veld said then. "You are, after all, the president's son's soulmate. Cosmo Canyon is quite a leap from Nibelheim, and taking into consideration that you were quite young when you dropped out of school –"

"You've been monitoring me?" Cloud asked, squeezing his hands into fists to stop them from shaking – or from reaching out and grabbing the man by the throat.

"ShinRa finances Nibelheim's school – we have access to the student records," Veld said, obviously trying to gauge Cloud's reaction. "We were concerned that given your lack of schooling, you might be in some sort of financial bind and were forced to leave because of it."

Cloud smiled at that – his _broken bottle_ smile Tifa called it. "You were _worried_ about me? How sweet."

Veld cleared his throat. "If you're in some sort of trouble –"

"I'm not," Cloud answered with a snort. "I moved to Cosmo Canyon because Nibelheim is a miserable cold place and because people there are miserable and close minded," he said and motioned at the solar panel on the table, in its half soldered state. "And because this sort of occupation of one's time is considered useless there. Cosmo Canyon is a bit more welcoming in that regard."

If Veld could tell there was something weird about what he was saying, the man paid no attention to it. He was too busy staring at Cloud's hand, the hand he'd lifted to motion at the solar panel – his left hand. The hand with the jagged green string.

"… Oh," the man said, his eyes widening ever so slightly. "That's…"

"Yeah," Cloud said, his tone almost vicious. "So. Anything else you're _worried_ about, Mr. Veld? Because I have a piece to finish."

The Turk eyed the string for a moment and then looked at Cloud levelly – almost sadly. "I knew he must've made a bad first impression. But _that_ bad?"

Cloud said nothing, just shook his head and turned to the panel. He made to grab the iron again, but his hand was shaking so he squeezed it into a fist and rested it against the table. "Is there anything else you wanted?" he asked through gritted teeth.

The man was quiet for a moment before he sighed. "No, I suppose there wasn't. I'm… sorry for bothering you," he said and stepped back finally, though that didn't help Cloud relax one bit. "Although… you must know that Master Rufus is nineteen now. Two more years…"

Cloud swallowed at that, his neck tensing further. He licked his lips and then asked. "Do you think I'll be a huge disappointment this time too?" he asked, his voice shaking. He was grinning, widely, _manically_ , and he wasn't entirely sure why.

"Hard to say," Veld said evasively – which basically meant _yes_. "You… won't be what he's expecting."

Cloud almost wanted to ask what Rufus was expecting – but the idea that Rufus was expecting _something_ almost made him choke there and then. So, instead he flicked the soldering iron back on and leaned his elbows against the table, staring at the solar panel. He said nothing. His voice would break if he did, he was fucking sure it would.

"I'll… here's my card, I'll just leave it over here," Veld said almost awkwardly. "If you need anything, give me a call. I know it must not feel like that at all, but… I for one do care for your wellbeing."

Cloud snorted. "Close the door when you get out."

Veld hesitated, as if he wanted to say something more. In the end he didn't – he left and he closed the door. Cloud could hear him say something to the Wutaian outside, and then he heard their steps, receding, leaving. And still he couldn't breathe properly, still he couldn't relax.

And then it welled up.

By the time Tifa rushed in, breathless and worried, Cloud had already managed to shatter the solar panel into thousands of pieces. It took not just her, but Vincent to tear him away from it, his fists bleeding from cuts and nicks all over and at least one knuckle dislocated, more than one finger broken.

"Cloud, Cloud!" Tifa snapped at him, taking him by face. "Cloud, calm down! Snap out of it."

Cloud punched her, smearing blood and glass shards all over her cheek and Vincent knocked him into a blissful, soothing darkness.

When he came to, Highwind had left and he was in their house, his hands wrapped up, four fingers splinted. Tifa was sitting by his bed, quietly twisting wire around green-yellow stones. She was making a necklace, judging by the looks of the size of it.

"So," she said without looking up. "It _wasn't_ about the Children of the Sun, but about _him_?"

Cloud turned around and away from her, to face the cool, tiled wall. Solar tiles, he thought. He'd soldered most of them. The piece he'd shattered was supposed to go to Bugenhagen's house, to replace one of the windows there. It was supposed to be first of many.

"My hands?" he asked, his voice a dry croak.

"You broke two fingers, a third was dislocated, and you almost severed the sinew on the fourth one," she said. "You won't be holding anything, never mind a pen or soldering iron or even a pair of tweezers, for a while. Vincent offered to heal them with Materia, mind you, but I told him no. You fucking _deserve_ to heal normally."

Cloud sighed. "Thanks," he said and closed his eyes.

"How bad was it then?"

 For a while Cloud said nothing. It hadn't been that bad, actually. Certainly not as bad as he'd thought, or feared, or imagined. And he'd imagined it a thousand times, hearing about Rufus, getting a message, an order, something. But at the same time… "I'm not what he'll be expecting," Cloud said finally.

"I could've told you that – you're nothing anyone's expecting," Tifa snorted and shook her head. "Which is what I guess you're aiming for anyway, so what the hell does it matter? Not a damn thing." She trailed away and glanced at him. "That man who talked with you? Vincent says he knows him. Knew him. Was his partner, way back when."

"Hm," Cloud answered, thinking about it. In the end though he didn't care about Veld or his and Vincent's connection or whatever. " _Your_ soulmate knocked me out," he said accusingly.

"Yes, he did, didn't he?" Tifa asked almost smugly. "And he's going to teach me how he did it so that I can do it the next time you flip like that. And I will," she added and turned her face, pointing at her cheek. "Look what you did, you asshole."

She had the scars of several tiny cuts across the cheek where Cloud's glass covered fist had hit her. He winced. "Sorry," he said. "It… doesn't look bad, though? Kinda healed, actually – how long have I been out of it?"

"Just a couple of hours. Vincent healed it with materia," Tifa snorted. "They'll fade, but I'm still going to kick your ass so many times before you can even begin to beg for my forgiveness. So, so many ass-kickings in your future, you can't even imagine."

Cloud snorted and then just looked at her, sitting there with her filigree work, watching over him. "You're ridiculous," he said, trying to not sound as hopelessly grateful as he felt and failing horribly. "What are you even doing here? What did I ever do to deserve you?"

"You didn't," Tifa said and lifted the necklace. It was a ridiculous and faintly gravity defying and of course she fitted it around his neck. "And that's the whole point," she added, smiling. "You totally don't deserve me, nor do you try to deserve me. And that's the only reason I can stand you at all. You idiot."

"What's this?" Cloud asked, waving a bandaged hand at the necklace.

"Your new _collar_. Break it and I'll break your kneecaps," she said and stood up. "Now get some rest, you idiot, and try not to move your hands. If you strain them, the healers say you might _never_ hold a soldering iron again."

"Yeah, yeah," Cloud said, even as the thought of not being able to work send a chill down his spine. "I'll be good, mom, I swear."

"You better," she said and then bent over to place a kiss on his forehead. "You're better than him, whoever he is," she said. "You are so much better. I don't care if you don't believe it – you _are_. Don't you ever forget it."

It was first time anyone had ever said it.

That made it all the harder to believe it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have happy holidays :)

**Author's Note:**

> Fair Warning: I don't like soulmate stories. In this story being soulmates does not automatically equal instant happiness. Also soulmates don't equate pairings, hence no pairing tags. In general, this won't be positive or happy soulmate story.
> 
> I do like renewable energy tech though. So there will be lot of renewable energy babble eventually. Lot and lot of it. 
> 
> Also Cloud will be massively out of character and I'm not even ashamed. You've been warned.
> 
> Proofread by Darlene.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Esama Collection](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1397044) by [Altherin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Altherin/pseuds/Altherin)




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